Lake Superior Trivia
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56 free Lake Superior trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
53 free Lake Superior trivia questions with answers. Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake on Earth by surface area, big enough to swallow Austria, and this quiz treats it as the world of its own that it is. You will cover the geography (how deep, how cold, how long water stays), the shipwrecks and storms that made the Whitefish Point coast infamous, the Edmund Fitzgerald in detail, and the towns and parks around the shore: Duluth, Thunder Bay, Marquette, the Keweenaw, Isle Royale, Pictured Rocks and the Apostle Islands. It is written for people who live on or visit the lake, for pub-quiz hosts in the Upper Midwest and Northern Ontario, and for anyone who has ever hummed the Gordon Lightfoot song. Questions run from easy to genuinely hard, so a table of mixed ages can play together. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question carries its source, so if a fact surprises you, you can go and read where it came from.
30 of 56 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Lake Superior drains east into which of the other Great Lakes?
Huron
Huron. Nature no longer decides how much water makes the trip: gates across the lake's outlet let a joint US-Canadian board set Superior's outflow.
Q 02Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake by area, but which salty body of water is usually ranked the world's largest lake?
Caspian Sea
The Caspian Sea. Whether it counts as a lake or a sea was argued over for decades by the five countries on its shores, because the answer decided how its oil and gas would be shared.
Q 03Which two lakes hold more fresh water than Lake Superior?
Baikal and Tanganyika
Baikal and Tanganyika each cover well under half of Superior's area, but both fill rift valleys more than a kilometre deep, while Superior averages under 500 feet.
Q 04The Ojibwe name for Lake Superior, gichi-gami, which Longfellow wrote as 'Gitche Gumee', means what?
Great sea
Great sea. Longfellow glossed the name as 'Big-Sea-Water', and gichigami is still the everyday Ojibwe word for a sea or any large lake.
Q 05Henry Wadsworth Longfellow set which poem 'by the shores of Gitche Gumee'?
The Song of Hiawatha
The Song of Hiawatha took its legends from Henry Schoolcraft's Ojibwe collections and its drumbeat metre from the Kalevala, a borrowing that brought accusations of plagiarism.
Q 06Missionaries of which Catholic order explored Lake Superior in the 1660s and charted its shores?
Jesuits
Jesuits Claude Allouez and Claude Dablon travelled round the lake and mapped it. Its French name, lac supérieur, meant simply the upper lake, the highest in the chain, and had nothing to do with size.
Q 07Lake Superior's surface area is roughly the same as that of which European country?
Austria
Austria covers about 83,900 square km against the lake's 82,100. That much water is slow to warm and cool, which keeps the lake's shores cooler in summer and milder in winter than places inland.
Q 08Roughly how deep is Lake Superior at its deepest point?
1,300 ft
1,300 ft is about right: the deepest sounding is some 1,330 feet. The lake's surface sits 600 feet above sea level, so its floor there lies more than 700 feet below it.
Q 09Roughly how long does a drop of water stay in Lake Superior before it flows out?
About 200 years
About 200 years is the average (191 by the usual count), because the lake holds more water than the other four Great Lakes combined and has only one outlet. Shallow Lake Erie, by contrast, flushes through in under three years.
Q 10Lake Superior's deepest water stays near 4 °C all year because fresh water at that temperature is what?
At its densest
At its densest, water sinks, so the 4 °C layer settles on the bottom and stays there. Twice a year the whole lake reaches that temperature and mixes from top to bottom.
Q 11There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover all of North and South America to what depth?
About 12 inches
That is roughly 2,900 cubic miles of water, about a tenth of the world's surface fresh water. Storm waves on it have topped 30 feet.
Q 12What is the largest island in Lake Superior?
Isle Royale
Isle Royale has no roads at all, so visitors leave their cars on the mainland, arrive by ferry or seaplane, and get around on foot or by canoe.
Q 13The national park on Lake Superior's largest island is famous for a long study of which predator and prey?
Wolves and moose
Q 21A statue overlooking Lake Superior near Thunder Bay honours which Canadian, forced to end his 1980 cross-country run nearby?
Terry Fox
Terry Fox had run close to a marathon a day for 143 days on an artificial leg when cancer reached his lungs. He had hoped to raise a dollar for every Canadian, and the total passed that mark months before he died.
Q 22Which pink-iced pastry is the signature treat of Thunder Bay?
The Persian
The Persian's recipe is a closely kept secret at the bakery said to have created it. Locals often slice one in half, toast it in a frying pan and spread on more of the pink berry icing.
Q 23Which US body runs the Soo Locks toll-free?
Army Corps of Engineers
Wolves and moose make an unusually simple system on the island: the wolves are the only predator of the moose, and the moose are almost their only food. Scientists have tracked both since 1958.
Q 14The national park on Lake Superior's largest island does what each winter?
Closes completely
Closes completely: from 1 November to 15 April the whole park shuts because of extreme winter weather, for visitors' own safety.
Q 15Duluth's French namesake reached Lake Superior's western end in 1679 to make peace between the Ojibwe and which nation?
Dakota
Dakota and Ojibwe leaders made peace at meetings he arranged on the lake in 1679. The next year he won the release of the missionary Louis Hennepin, held captive by another Dakota band.
Q 16Duluth's Aerial Bridge, built in 1905, was the first of what kind of bridge in the United States?
Transporter
Transporter bridges carry traffic in a gondola slung beneath a high span, and Duluth's held 350 people plus wagons. Growing car traffic stretched it past its limit, so in 1929-30 it was rebuilt as the lift bridge that stands today.
Q 17Which musician was born in Duluth in 1941?
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman, lived in Duluth until he was six. His father then caught polio and the family moved north to his mother's home town of Hibbing, where he grew up.
Q 18Which waterway, opened in 1959, lets oceangoing ships sail 2,300 miles inland to reach Duluth?
St. Lawrence Seaway
St. Lawrence Seaway locks opened the Great Lakes to ocean ships in 1959. Nicknamed 'salties', they take about a week and 16 locks to climb from the Atlantic to Duluth, often to load grain.
Q 19Thunder Bay, Ontario, was created on 1 January 1970 by merging Fort William with which other city?
Port Arthur
Port Arthur and Fort William were long-time rivals that merged only under pressure from the Ontario government. Voters picked the new name, and 'Thunder Bay' won because 'Lakehead' and 'The Lakehead' split the rest.
Q 20One Ojibwe legend identifies the Sleeping Giant near Thunder Bay as which trickster hero, turned to stone?
Nanabozho
Nanabozho, known around Thunder Bay as Nanabijou, is said to have been turned to stone when the secret of a rich silver deposit at Silver Islet was given away to white men.
Army Corps of Engineers crews have run the locks since 1881, when Michigan, which had operated the first of them from 1855, handed them to the federal government. Passage has been free ever since.
Q 24The SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank on November 10, 1975, about 15 nautical miles from which cape?
Whitefish Point
Whitefish Point marks the sheltered bay the damaged ship was running for. Her captain had radioed a freighter behind him, 'Will you stay by me till I get to Whitefish?', and she sank about 17 miles short.
Q 25How many crew members died when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down?
29
29 men were aboard and none survived. The ship went down so suddenly that no distress call was sent: minutes earlier her captain had told a freighter following behind, 'We are holding our own.'
Q 26What cargo was the Edmund Fitzgerald carrying on its final voyage from Superior, Wisconsin?
Taconite pellets
Taconite pellets are marble-sized balls of processed iron ore, and she carried about 26,000 tons of them. The Coast Guard judged that water flooding into that loaded hold most likely sank her, though the cause is still argued over.
Q 27Which singer-songwriter recorded 'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald'?
Gordon Lightfoot
Gordon Lightfoot wrote it after reading a Newsweek report on the sinking. His ballad helped make the Fitzgerald, one freighter among hundreds lost on the lakes, one of the best-known wrecks of them all.
Q 28In 1995 divers in an atmospheric suit recovered what from the Edmund Fitzgerald, leaving a replica in its place?
The ship's bell
The ship's bell was raised to serve as a memorial to the crew and is now on display at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum. The replica left on the wreck is engraved with the name of every man who died.
Q 29Which Wisconsin insurance company owned the Edmund Fitzgerald and named the ship after its own chairman?
Northwestern Mutual
Northwestern Mutual built the ship as an investment, not to sail her itself: it chartered her to a Cleveland shipping firm. At 729 feet she was the biggest vessel on the lakes when launched in 1958.
Q 30Why is it said that Lake Superior 'never gives up her dead'?
Cold water keeps bodies from floating
Cold water keeps bodies from floating: the deep lake stays near 4 °C all year, which slows the decay that would normally fill a body with gas and lift it back to the surface within days.