How Big Lake Erie Is Compared To Wales

Here is a genuinely humbling fact for Wales: the smallest Great Lake by volume, the one the other four quietly pick on at family gatherings, is still comfortably bigger than the entire country*. This is Lake Erie versus Wales, and, spoiler alert, the lake wins.

The Numbers

Let's start with the raw figures. Lake Erie covers about 9,910 square miles. Wales, the whole proud country, covers roughly 8,020. That makes the lake about 24 percent larger than the entire nation, rugby pitches, castles, sheep, and all. A lake beating a country is already a strange sentence to write, but it only gets better once you remember which lake we are talking about.

You Could Sink Wales in It

Picture scooping up the whole of Wales, Snowdon, Cardiff, the 3.1 million people, that genuinely excellent dragon flag, and gently lowering it into Lake Erie. It would disappear beneath the surface, and you would still have roughly 1,900 square miles of open water left sloshing around on top, an area larger than the entire state of Rhode Island. The lake would not so much as ripple with the effort.

The Runt of the Great Lakes, and Still Bigger

Here is the part that really stings. Lake Erie is the runt of the Great Lakes family. It is the shallowest of the five, averaging a mere 62 feet deep, and it holds the least water of all of them by a wide margin. It is, by Great Lakes standards, very much the little one. And yet this little one still swallows an entire United Kingdom country whole. Wales would drown in what, to its enormous siblings Superior and Huron, counts as barely more than a wading pool.

Where Wales Fights Back

In fairness, Wales does not lose on every single count. It wins handily on height, since Snowdon rises about 3,560 feet while Lake Erie's deepest point reaches only 210 feet down. Wales is also home to around 3.1 million people, several thousand years of history, and some truly magnificent castles, whereas Lake Erie is home to walleye and not a great deal else. And, crucially, Wales has a dragon on its flag, which no Great Lake can honestly claim. So it is not a complete rout.

Putting It in Perspective

Still, the scale gap is almost comical. Wales's own largest natural lake, Bala Lake, covers under two square miles, which makes it something like one five-thousandth the size of Lake Erie. Even the smallest of the five Great Lakes, the one Americans genuinely think of as the modest, shallow one, utterly dwarfs a proud and ancient nation. So the next time Wales comes up in conversation, picture the whole country quietly slipping beneath the surface of a lake its own neighbors consider small.