Lake Michigan

Lake Michigan is one of the five Great Lakes in North America. It has a surface area of 22,300 square miles (58,000 square kilometers). It is 307 by 118 miles (494 by 190 kilometers) wide. Lake Michigan is the 5th largest lake in the world.

Lake Michigan is surrounded by the U.S. states of Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. It is the only Great Lake that is not partly in Canada.^[1] The largest city on the shore of Lake Michigan is Chicago.

The earliest time that people lived near the lake was 800 CE. The word "Michigan" originally meant the lake itself. It is believed to come from the Ojibwa word mishigami meaning "great water".^[2]

The first person to reach the deepest part of Lake Michigan was J. Val Klump. Klump reached the bottom with a submarine as part of a 1985 research expedition.^[3]

Twelve million people live along Lake Michigan's shores. They are mainly in the Chicago and Milwaukee areas.

1. ↑ "Lake Michigan". Great Lakes.net. Archived from the original on January 1, 2010. Retrieved September 1, 2014.
2. ↑ "Superior Watershed Partnership Projects". Archived from the original on 2007-09-28. Retrieved 2014-09-01.
3. ↑ "Variations In Sediment Accumulation Rates And The Flux Of Labile Organic Matter In Eastern Lake Superior Basins". The Journal of Great Lakes Research. 1989. Archived from the original on 2012-12-03. Retrieved 2009-08-09. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)