Are they really great?!
March 17, 2008 on 5:03 pm | In RegionalThe Great Lakes are a chain of freshwater lakes located in eastern North America, on the Canada-United States border. Consisting of Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron (or Michigan-Huron), Erie, and Ontario, they form the largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth. They are sometimes referred to as inland seas or Canada and the United States’ fourth coast. Dispersed throughout the Great Lakes are approximately 35,000 islands. The largest among them is Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron, the largest island in any inland body of water and home to the world’s largest lake within a lake, Lake Manitou. The second-largest island is Isle Royale in Lake Superior. Both of these islands are large enough to contain multiple lakes themselves. The Great Lakes contain roughly 22% of the world?s fresh surface water: 5,472 cubic miles (22,810 km³), or 6.0×1015 U.S. gallons (2.3×1016 liters). This is enough water to cover the 48 contiguous U.S. states to a uniform depth of 9.5 feet (2.9 m).
The combined surface area of the lakes is approximately 94,250 square miles (244,100 km²)?nearly the same size as the United Kingdom, and larger than the U.S. states of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire combined. The Great Lakes coast measures approximately 10,500 miles (16,900 km); however, the length of a coastline is impossible to measure exactly and is not a well-defined measure.