Lake Superior
Lake Superior is the largest of the Great Lakes of North America, and among freshwater lakes, it is the world’s largest by surface area and the third-largest by volume.
It is shared by Ontario to the north, Minnesota to the west, and Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to the south.[12] Lake Superior is the most northerly and most westerly of the Great Lakes chain, and the highest in elevation, draining into Lake Huron via St. Mary’s River .
The Ojibwe name for the lake is gichi-gami (pronounced gitchi-gami or kitchi-gami in different dialects), meaning “great sea”. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the name as “Gitche Gumee” in the poem The Song of Hiawatha, as did Gordon Lightfoot in his song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”. According to other sources, the full Ojibwe name is Ojibwe Gichigami (“Ojibwe’s Great Sea”) or Anishinaabe Gichigami (“Anishinaabe’s Great Sea”).
The 1878 dictionary by Father Frederic Baraga, the first one written for the Ojibway language, gives the Ojibwe name as Otchipwe-kitchi-gami (a transcription of Ojibwe Gichigami).
The first French explorers approaching the great inland sea by way of the Ottawa River and Lake Huron in the 17th century referred to their discovery as le lac supérieur (the upper lake, i.e. above Lake Huron).
The lake was also called Lac Tracy (for Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy) by 17th century Jesuit missionaries.[15] The British, upon taking control of the region from the French in the 1760s following the French and Indian War, anglicized the lake’s name to Superior, “on account of its being superior in magnitude to any of the lakes on that vast continent”.
Lake Superior empties into Lake Huron via the St. Marys River and the Soo Locks. Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world in area and the third largest in volume, behind Lake Baikal in Siberia and Lake Tanganyika in East Africa. The Caspian Sea, while larger than Lake Superior in both surface area and volume, is brackish; though presently isolated, prehistorically the Caspian has been repeatedly connected to and then isolated from the Mediterranean via the Black Sea.
