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List of shipwrecks in the Great Lakes

Wikimedia list article

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 20, 2026
Entity authorityQ6639298 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Great Lakes, a collection of five freshwater lakes located in North America, have been sailed upon since at least the 17th century, and thousands of ships have been sunk while traversing them. Many of these ships were never found, so the exact number of shipwrecks in the Lakes is unknown; the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum estimates 6,000 ships and 30,000 lives lost, while historian and mariner Mark Thompson has estimated that the total number of wrecks is likely more than 25,000. In the period between 1816, when the Invincible was lost, to the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975, the Whitefish Point area alone has claimed at least 240 ships.

Lake Superior

Lake Huron

Lake Michigan

Lake Erie

Lake Ontario

Other

See also

Graveyard of the Great Lakes

List of Great Lakes shipwrecks on the National Register of Historic Places

References

External links

The Great Lakes Shipwreck File, a list maintained by David D. Swayze which details over 4,900 shipwrecks. (Archived by the Wayback Machine.)

Great Lakes Hold Fortune in Treasure Archived 12 February 2023 at the Wayback Machine, Port Light, Volume 3, Number 43, Door County, Wisconsin, November 15, 1945, page 3

Further reading

Kohl, Cris (2008). The Great Lakes Diving Guide (2nd ed.). West Chicago: Seawolf Communications. ISBN 978-0967997698. Thumbnail histories, descriptions and locations of more than 1,000 Great Lakes shipwrecks located to date.

Kohl, Cris; Forsberg, Joan (2007).

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “List of shipwrecks in the Great Lakes” is wikimedia list article. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through List, shipwrecks and Great, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1816, 1975, 2023, 1945—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, List, shipwrecks and Great is the immediate research focus.
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This entry incorporates text from “List of shipwrecks in the Great Lakes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.