How Big Lake Michigan Is Compared To Switzerland
Here is a geography fact tailor-made to ruin somebody's night at trivia: a single lake in the American Midwest is bigger than the entire country of Switzerland. That is Lake Michigan versus the proud land of the Alps, chocolate, and famously discreet banks. Spoiler alert: the lake wins, and it is not even close.
The Numbers
Let's lay it out plainly. Lake Michigan covers about 22,400 square miles of surface. Switzerland, the entire sovereign country, covers around 15,940. That makes the lake roughly 40 percent larger than the whole nation, Alps and all. One lake, one country, and the lake wins by a comfortable margin, which is not a sentence anyone expects to write very often. And remember, Lake Michigan is only the third-largest of the Great Lakes by surface area; its bigger siblings, Superior and Huron, would make Switzerland look even more modest.
You Could Sink Switzerland in It
Here is the fun way to picture it. Scoop up the whole of Switzerland, the Matterhorn, the ski resorts, the 8.8 million people, the mountains of chocolate, and gently lower the entire thing into Lake Michigan. It would vanish beneath the surface, and you would still have roughly 6,400 square miles of open water left sloshing around on top, an area larger than the entire state of Connecticut. The lake would, frankly, barely notice the splash.
America's Biggest Private Lake
What makes this especially cheeky is that Lake Michigan is the only one of the five Great Lakes that sits entirely within the US; the other four are all shared with Canada. So this country-sized body of water is, in effect, America's largest "private" lake. In fact, it holds the title of the largest lake anywhere on Earth contained entirely within a single country. The US casually owns a lake bigger than a sovereign European nation, and does not even have to split it with the neighbors.
And It's Seriously Deep
It is not just a wide, shallow puddle, either. Lake Michigan plunges to about 923 feet deep, stretches roughly 307 miles from top to bottom, and holds some 1,180 cubic miles of water. For a sense of scale, Switzerland's own largest lake, Lake Geneva, covers roughly 224 square miles, which works out to about one one-hundredth the surface area of Lake Michigan. Switzerland's grandest lake would not make a particularly respectable puddle out here in the Midwest.
Putting It in Perspective
So the next time a friend comes back from hiking across Switzerland and simply will not stop talking about it, you may gently remind them that the entire country would fit comfortably inside a lake you can see from a Chicago rooftop, with plenty of room left over for a swim. It is one of those facts that sounds completely made up and absolutely is not: a single Midwestern lake, quietly out-sizing the whole land of the Alps.
