(soft music) - What is so noticeable about Lake Superior is its wild nature.

It's so highly undeveloped when compared to the other four Great Lakes.

It has the longest shoreline of all of them, but yet it has the fewest amount of people living in its basin.

One way to look at that is to consider that in all of the Great Lakes combined there's almost 40 million people inhabiting.

Lake Superior has only about 700,000 people living in its watershed.

And so in terms of anthropogenic pressure put on it as a resource, it just doesn't compare to what is required of the other Great Lakes.

(soft music) Lake Superior has the largest footprint of any freshwater lake in the world.

Its square footage covers 32,000 square miles.

And then when you couple that with its depth Lake Superior averages, almost 500 feet deep it reaches depths of almost 1300 feet deep where Lake Michigan only averages about 280 feet deep.

Other ways to look at that was a Great Lakes contain 20% of all of earth's fresh surface water.

And have that over half of it is in Lake superior, okay?

So it contains over 10% of all of the planet's fresh surface water.

You can fit all of the other four Great Lakes in the Lake Superior, okay?

So it's storing quite a bit of water for us and when it does, it does it for a long time for generations really.

So for example, a raindrop falling in Lake Superior will be contained in the Lake for up to 200 years.

Lake Erie's residence time is only about two and a half years.

Okay, so it contains a lot of water and it holds on to it for us for a really, really, really long time.

In terms of that water, what's so striking when many folks visit the Lake Superior shoreline is just how blue and crystal clear Lake Superior is compared to some of the other inland lakes that they've seen before.

And really that's indicative of what's known as an Oligotrophic Lake, one that is very cold, very well oxygenated, very deep and relatively clean.

(soft upbeat music) An Oligotrophic lake has a relatively low productivity, biologic productivity because it has fewer plant nutrients lesser concentrations of organic carbon in its sediments.

And really what it's indicative of is a lake that's rather young for its evolutionary lifespan.

(soft upbeat music) So while all the Great Lakes provide an invaluable resource to us.

There's truly none that are greater than Lake Superior.

(soft upbeat music)