I find the great lakes terrifying, may i have some cursed knowledge on them?
when you say "great lakes" and "cursed" in the same sentence, we usually think you're just talking about Lake Superior.
the great lakes are huge, sure! combined, they're roughly the size of fucking France.
but Superior is the granddaddy of them all.
the largest of the great lakes in terms of surface area, depth, and overall volume, Lake Superior contains 2,903 cubic miles of water, or 10% of the world's entire surface freshwater supply.
that's enough to cover the entire surface area of North AND South America in a solid foot of ice-cold murkish water, and probably also a bunch of confused sturgeons. yow!
but sturgeons aren't all this lake contains, by any means!
it's also full of corpses.
see, Lake Superior is just SO fucking hugebig and deep (about 1000 feet at its deepest point) that it doesn't warm up very quickly, even in the depths of summer! its northerly location and the amount of time it spends frozen over each year means that this lake reaches an average surface temperature of 46-56 degrees fahrenheit, even in the hottest months.
don't even think about the coldest months.
that's cold enough to kill you dead as a Sim with a deleted pool ladder if you fall in and can't get out! and it's ALSO cold enough that if you do die, your body will just sink into the icy depths, and stay there. you won't rot, and there isn't even anything alive down there that might consider your corpsicle a worthy feast because there's so little oxygen; you're basically just stuck down there in the world's largest meat freezer for the rest of eternity.
but you're in good company! since everyone who dies on the lake and sinks to the bottom is still there, there are an estimated 10,000 corpses lying around on the lakebed right now!
(there are a number of explorable shipwrecks in Superior that are known to still, uh, have crew on board, so to speak. divers are expected to leave them alone and treat their death sites respectfully.)
and that's not even counting the literal thousands of years humans were paddling around on the lakes in pre-colonial times either, so in all honesty that's probably lowballing it.
and that doesn't seem likely to change, anytime soon- as long as the lake exists, those corpses are just going to be stuck down there, waiting around for whatever comes next.
so uh anyway, if the concept of the eternal preservation of your mortal form bothers you, stay AWAY from that lake! and maybe just become a volcano researcher instead, I dunno.
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