Loading the lake floor
Every Lake Erie wreck with a known resting place, 280 of them. Erie is the shallowest Great Lake, so it does not take much: half of these ships lie under less than 36 feet of water. 250 Lake Superior wrecks with a known resting place. Most went down within sight of shore, but the lake is deep enough to hide a few of them under more than 800 feet of water. The water is taken out here. Tap a wreck for its name, the year it was lost and how deep it lies.
Erie averages about 62 feet deep and for a century it was one of the busiest lakes on Earth. Wind builds short, steep waves on shallow water fast. Somewhere between 1,400 and 2,000 vessels were lost here. Most were never found, so this map shows only the ones with a published position.
The western basin, the pale shelf west of the islands, holds more than a hundred of them in water you could stand a house in. The deepest lie in the trough off Long Point, the sandbar sailors called a graveyard.
There is a free 36 by 24 inch print of this lake with every wreck named.
The Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society puts Superior's losses at 500 to 600 ships. About 200 of them went down on the 80 miles between Grand Marais and Whitefish Point, where the downbound traffic funnels toward the Soo.
Most of the mapped wrecks sit on the steep shelves around the Apostle Islands, Isle Royale, the Keweenaw and Whitefish Bay, in less than 100 feet of water. Then the floor keeps going down for another thousand feet. The Edmund Fitzgerald lies at about 525 feet, and the Hudson and S.R. Kirby, off the Keweenaw, at 800 feet and more.
Each red dot is a wreck. Tap one for its name, the year it was lost and how deep it lies, with a link out to search for its story. Fainter dots are positions a source only gives approximately. The floor is colored by depth, sand in the shallows and dark blue in the deep.
No single list of Great Lakes wrecks exists, so each lake's positions were merged from many: NOAA's navigational charts and AWOIS wreck records, Ohio Sea Grant and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the Michigan DNR's underwater preserves, the Wisconsin Historical Society, ShipwreckWorld, OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia and Wikidata. Two points within 400 m, or the same name a few kilometres apart, count as one wreck. A few ships still appear twice under different spellings, and some broke up and are listed as a bow and a stern.
The lake floor is NOAA NCEI's Great Lakes bathymetry at 3 arc-seconds, about 90 m a cell, measured from each lake's Low Water Datum. A wreck's depth is the depth its source reports when it gives one, and otherwise it is read from that grid, so it can be off by a few feet from what a diver would find, and by more on Superior's steep shores. Canadian waters are thinner than American ones on both lakes because fewer Canadian positions are published.
Land imagery is from Esri. The floor is the same one drawn at The Floor of the Great Lakes. Not for navigation, and not for diving: many of these sites are protected.
Ryan Sajdak, 2026. More maps at ryansajdak.com/projects.