Is Lake Baikal bigger than Lake Superior?

So, in a line-up of the usual lake suspects, Lake Superior is the biggest by surface area and Lake Baikal is the largest by volume. But here's where things get interesting. After you've decided what measurements to use to determine “biggest,” you then have to ask yourself an even harder question – what is a lake?



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World's Largest Lake (by volume): Lake Baikal is the world's largest freshwater lake in terms of volume. It contains about 5,521 cubic miles of water (23,013 cubic kilometers), or approximately 20% of Earth's fresh surface water.

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Amazingly, a single lake holds as much fresh water as all the Great Lakes combined – Lake Baikal. This rift lake in Siberia has a maximum depth of 5,371ft (1,637m). For comparison, the largest of the Great Lakes (Lake Superior) is only 25% as deep, with a maximum depth of 1,333ft (406m).

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Lake Superior is the largest of the Great Lakes and ranks as the second largest lake in the world (by surface area). Source: Lake Superior Basin statistics map produced by Michigan Sea Grant/Michigan State University Extension (2000).

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The average underwater visibility of Lake Superior is about 8 metres or 27 feet, making it the cleanest and clearest of the Great Lakes.

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Lake Superior is the largest lake in the United States. This lake shares shorelines with Michigan, Minnesota, and parts of Ontario. This lake is known for holding 1/10th of the Earth's surface freshwater; it's massive. The lake's maximum depth is over 1,000 feet!

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Not only is Lake Baikal safe to swim in, but it also boasts some of the purest water in the world. The only drawback is the temperature - even during the warmer months, a dip in the lake is pretty invigorating.

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At 1,943 feet (592 meters), Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States and one of the deepest in the world. The depths were first explored thoroughly in 1886 by a party from the U.S. Geological Survey.

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Lake Baikal is not only the largest, deepest, and oldest lake in the world, but houses around 2,000 unique known species of animal that are not found anywhere else on Earth.

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Baikal's age is estimated at 25–30 million years, making it the most ancient lake in geological history. It is unique among large, high-latitude lakes, as its sediments have not been scoured by overriding continental ice sheets.

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Lake Michigan, the third largest by surface area (22,300 square miles) and second largest by volume (1,180 cubic miles), is the only Great Lake located entirely within the United States.

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Lake Michigan wrecks: the oldest and the mostest Lake Michigan contains more shipwrecks than any of the other Great Lakes, as well as the oldest recorded one: the French ship Griffon, the first European vessel to sail the Lakes.

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The Ojibwe name for the lake is gichi-gami (in syllabics: ????, pronounced gitchi-gami or kitchi-gami in different dialects), meaning great sea. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote this name as Gitche Gumee in the poem The Song of Hiawatha, as did Gordon Lightfoot in his song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

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Lake Erie is the fourth-largest lake in North America (by surface area) and the eleventh-largest worldwide. It is the Great Lakes' southernmost, shallowest, and smallest by volume. By the 1960s, Lake Erie had become the most polluted of the Great Lakes, owing to the substantial industrial presence along its coasts.

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Lake Michigan The Great Lakes are all water bodies that swimmers should think twice about entering. Lake Michigan in particular is the roughest of the Great Lakes, and poses a major risk to those thinking of taking a dip. This body of water is often named the most dangerous lake in the United States.

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Lake Erie is the shallowest and warmest of the Great Lakes.

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Located in Russia in the southern region of Siberia, Lake Baikal is the world's largest freshwater lake by both volume (22995 km3) and depth (1741m).

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The Aral Sea (/'ær?l/ ARR-?l) was an endorheic lake lying between Kazakhstan to its north and Uzbekistan to its south which began shrinking in the 1960s and largely dried up by the 2010s.

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Forming c. 12 million years ago, the largest lake ever known to have existed on Earth is Megalake Paratethys, which extended from the eastern Alps of Europe to what is now Kazakhstan in central Asia.

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