The amazing ship-graveyard where 550 wrecks sit in lake ‘bigger than Scotland’

An enormous late which holds 10% of all the freshwater on Earth is also home to an astonishing 550 known shipwrecks and is bigger than the size of Scotland.

Lake Superior is the largest of the five Great Lakes of North America, which also includes Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, and has an area of over 31,700 square miles.

To put the size of Superior into perspective, Scotland has an area of 30,081 square miles and Wales of just 8,000 square miles, meaning the body of water dwarfs both home nations.

Britain’s largest lake is Lough Neagh, in Northern Ireland, which has an area of just 151 square miles, meaning it could fit into Lake Superior a staggering 210 times.

As well as being gigantic, Lake Superior can also be dangerous as massive temperature differences between the northern colder Canadian side and the ‘warmer’ American southern aspect can set off powerful winds of up to 90mph.

Over the last 200 years, many unfortunate vessels have fallen foul of the extreme weather conditions, which are particularly deadly in the autumn months.

It is estimated that there are about 550 wrecks in the lake, of which around 350 have been discovered so far, according to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum.

Over the years, authorities have constructed several lighthouses across the Great Lakes region to protect shipping from dangerous rocks under the surface.

One such lighthouse is Split Rock, which was built by the US Lighthouse Service after the winter storms of November 1905 that killed 36 people and sunk or disabled 29 ships.

The Split Rock Lighthouse website records one notable disaster in relatively modern times when the SS Edmund Fitzgerald got into difficulty in 1975.

The Fitzgerald was the largest ship on the Great Lakes when she was launched on June 8, 1958, and sadly she became the biggest vessel to have ever been sunk there.

On November 10, 1975, the huge tanker went down in a storm taking with her the entire crew of 29 souls. Each year on this date the beacon of the Split Rock Lighthouse is lit in honour of those who lost their lives.