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VOLUME
- Lake Michigan is the 5th largest lake in the world.
- Lake Michigan is the second largest Great Lake by volume
with just under 1,180 cubic miles of water. That’s 1,302,701,875,200,000
gallons!
- Averaging 279 feet in depth, the lake is 925 feet deep
at its deepest point.
GEOLOGY & HYDROGEOLOGY
- Lake Michigan was carved more than a million years
ago by the movement of huge glaciers which later melted.
- Michigan has the longest freshwater shoreline in the
world and has more shoreline than any other state except Alaska.
- Approximately 118 miles wide and 307 miles long, Lake
Michigan has more than 1600 miles of shoreline.
- Lake Michigan is the only Great Lake entirely within
the United States.
- One of the only places in the world where Petoskey
stones can be found is on the northern beaches of Lake Michigan.
- The lake’s northern tier is in the colder, less
developed Upper Great Lakes region, while its more temperate southern
basin contains the Milwaukee and Chicago metropolitan areas. The drainage
basin, approximately twice as large as the 22,300 square miles of surface
water, includes portions of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin.
- Lake Michigan is hydrologically inseparable from Lake
Huron, joined by the wide Straits of Mackinac.
DUNES
- The sand dunes of Lake Michigan are the world’s
largest freshwater dunes.
- The Sleeping Bear Dunes rise 460 feet above Lake Michigan.
- The sand of Lake Michigan beaches in Michigan and northern
Indiana is known as “singing sand” due to the high quartz
content that causes a squeaking sound when walked upon.
- Upwellings in Lake Michigan can cause a drop in water
temperature of 24 degrees in only a few hours.
BIODIVERSITY
- 86 species of fish have been recorded in Lake Michigan.
- Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore is ranked third of
all U.S. National Parks in plant diversity.
- Lake Michigan has the largest sports fishery of all
the Great Lakes.
- Zebra mussels, quagga mussels, the sea lamprey, alewife,
and purple loosestrife are all invasive species that have settled in
Lake Michigan at the expense of other indigenous species. In fact, since
the early 1800s, more than 140 exotic species of animals and plants
have taken hold in Lake Michigan.
- Lake trout, Atlantic salmon, blue pike, and several
species of ciscoes have become extinct in Lake Michigan, while the American
eel, lake sturgeon, lake whitefish, lake herring, coaster brook trout,
deepwater sculpin, and several species of native clams have become endangered.
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