page_title: Lake Winnipeg
section_title: Hydrography
hierarchical_section_title: Lake Winnipeg / Hydrography
caption_attribution_description: English: Portion of NASA map showing the major lakes of Manitoba (Captions have been added by Kayoty)
context_page_description: Lake Winnipeg is a very large, relatively shallow 24,514-square-kilometre lake in North America, in the province of Manitoba, Canada. Its southern end is about 55 kilometres north of the city of Winnipeg. Lake Winnipeg is Canada's sixth-largest freshwater lake and the third-largest freshwater lake contained entirely within Canada, but it is relatively shallow excluding a narrow 36 m deep channel between the northern and southern basins. It is the eleventh-largest freshwater lake on Earth. The lake's east side has pristine boreal forests and rivers that were recently inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The lake is 416 km from north to south, with remote sandy beaches, large limestone cliffs, and many bat caves in some areas. Manitoba Hydro uses the lake as one of the largest reservoirs in the world. There are many islands, most of them undeveloped.
  The Sagkeeng First Nation holds a reserve on Turtle Island, in the southern part of the lake. The Anishinaabe people have been in this area for hundreds of years.
context_section_description: Lake Winnipeg has the largest watershed of any lake in Canada, receiving water from four U.S. states (North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Montana via tributaries of the Oldman River) and four Canadian provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Manitoba). The lake's watershed measures about 982,900 square kilometres (379,500 sq mi). Its drainage is about 40 times larger than its surface, a ratio bigger than any other large lake in the world.
  Lake Winnipeg drains northward into the Nelson River at an average annual rate of 2,066 cubic metres per second (72,960 cu ft/s), and forms part of the Hudson Bay watershed, which is one of the largest drainage basins in the world. This watershed area was known as Rupert's Land when the Hudson's Bay Company was chartered in 1670.
caption: NASA false-colour image of Lake Winnipeg
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