The largest freshwater lake by volume, __, is also the world's deepest and oldest. | |
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| Numbers Don't Lie |
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| Percentage of the world's fresh water held in ice caps and glaciers | 68.7 |
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| | Estimated number of shipwrecks in the Great Lakes | 6,000 |
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| Number of lakes in Canada at least 25 acres in size (the most in the world) | 879,800 |
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| | Fish species in the Great Lakes | 80+ |
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| Titan, one of Saturn's 82 moons, is the only other world with surface-level lakes, but they're filled with methane — not water. |
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As far as we know, there are only two places in our solar system where you'll find a lake: Earth and Saturn's largest moon, Titan. At first glance, the two worlds couldn't be more different. Titan's mass is 1/45th of Earth's, its surface temperature hovers around -292 degrees Fahrenheit, and one day on Titan lasts nearly 16 Earth days. But there are a few similarities. One is that, like Earth, Titan has a weather system that seems to involve rain pouring from clouds and pooling into oceans, rivers, and lakes — and some of these lakes can be absolutely huge. Titan's lake Kraken Mare, for example, is nearly the size of all the Great Lakes combined and could be up to 1,000 feet deep. But instead of water in this massive lake, Kraken Mare (like all of Titan's other lakes) is filled with liquid ethane and methane. While methane exists as a gas on Earth, it's a liquid on Titan, thanks to the freezing temperatures, as is its fellow hydrocarbon ethane. But you probably don't want to try swimming in Titan's lakes, even if you could somehow withstand the temperatures — methane is less dense than water, which means if you cannonballed into Kraken Mare, you'd sink like a rock. | |
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