There are roughly 1.42 million lakes in the world larger than 0.1 km² (about 25 acres).
62% of them are in a single country.
Canada.
That's 879,800 lakes — more than every other country on Earth combined. A McGill University analysis of the HydroLAKES database confirmed this in 2016, published in Nature Communications. Second place? Finland, with 187,888. Third? The United States, with about 111,000.
Canada alone has more lake surface area than any other country on the planet, including 563 lakes larger than 100 km² (about 39 square miles).
The Great Lakes — shared with the US — hold 18% of the world's fresh surface water all by themselves. That's enough water to flood the entire country of Canada to a depth of over 2 metres (6.5 feet).
Why does Canada have so many?
During the last Ice Age, massive glaciers covered most of northern North America. When they retreated roughly 10,000 years ago, they carved basins into the ancient rock of the Canadian Shield — the hard Precambrian bedrock that makes up much of central Canada. Those basins filled with meltwater. The result: hundreds of thousands of lakes, concentrated in a band across the northern hemisphere.
The same glacial forces explain why Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Alaska also rank high on lake counts — they were all under ice sheets too.
Some Canadian lakes are genuinely strange:
- Little Manitou Lake in Saskatchewan is so salty you float in it, like the Dead Sea
- On Victoria Island in Nunavut, there's a lake with an island in it, which has a lake on that island, which has another island inside that lake. A lake-in-a-lake-in-a-lake.
- Lake Abraham in Alberta freezes with trapped methane bubbles visible under the ice surface
If you could somehow visit one Canadian lake per day, it would take you 2,410 years to see them all.