We Drained Lake Superior. Its Floor Is 733 Feet Below Sea Level

Lake Superior looks like an ocean — but what's actually at the bottom? We drained it, foot by foot, using real NOAA lake-floor data: past the Edmund Fitzgerald, down to a floor 733 feet below sea level, and back a billion years to the crack that made it. ▼Chapters 0:00 Intro 0:35 Pulling the plug 1:13 The Edmund Fitzgerald 1:56 Down to the bottom 2:23 Below sea level 2:49 A billion-year-old crack 3:18 Glaciers dug it deeper 3:39 How much water 4:04 The answer 4:25 Next time ▼Terrain data ・Lakebed: NOAA ETOPO 2022 (15 arc-second grid) https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/etopo-global-relief-model ・Land: AWS Terrain Tiles (SRTM etc., processed) https://registry.opendata.aws/terrain-tiles/ ・Heights are exaggerated 50× so you can see them. 'Water left' percentages are our own calculation from the NOAA grid. ▼Sources ・EPA, Lake Superior physical facts (max depth 1,332 ft, average 483 ft, 2,900 cubic miles, 350 miles long, retention time 191 years) https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/greatlakes/geophysical-lake-superior_.html ・SS Edmund Fitzgerald (Nov 10, 1975; 29 crew; ~530 ft; ~17 miles from Whitefish Bay) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Edmund_Fitzgerald ・Shipwreck Coast, 200+ wrecks between Munising and Whitefish Point (Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveyard_of_the_Great_Lakes ・Midcontinent Rift, ~1.1 billion years ago (USGS / Eos) https://eos.org/features/new-insights-into-north-americas-midcontine ・Glacial scouring, last retreat ~10,000 years ago (National Park Service, via WorldAtlas) https://www.worldatlas.com/lakes/how-lake-superior-holds-more-water-than-the-other-four-great-lakes-combined.html ・'About one foot over North & South America': 2,900 mi³ ÷ ~16.4 million mi² of land ≈ 0.93 ft (our arithmetic) ・'Water left' at each depth and the deepest trough location: our own calculation from NOAA ETOPO 2022. The rift line on screen is a rough schematic. ▼Production Narration is an AI voice. The ice-sheet scene is a generated illustration. Next: we drain Lake Michigan. #LakeSuperior #GreatLakes #EdmundFitzgerald