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Lake Huron

The Great Lake with the longest shoreline

An island shoreline on Lake Huron
NASA / Public domain - via Wikimedia Commons

Lake Huron is the second-largest Great Lake by surface area, about 23,000 square miles (59,600 km²), shared between Michigan and the Canadian province of Ontario. Counting its thousands of islands and its deeply indented bays, it has by far the longest shoreline of any Great Lake. Georgian Bay, a great arm of the lake on the Canadian side, is itself nearly the size of a Great Lake.

Huron is joined to Lake Michigan at the Straits of Mackinac, so the two share the same water level and are sometimes treated as a single lake. Manitoulin Island, in the lake's north, is the largest island in any freshwater lake in the world. Glacial in origin like its neighbors, Huron drains south through the St. Clair River toward Lake Erie and the lower lakes.

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Great LakesLakePhysical Geography