The five Great Lakes of North America. Three border the US and Canada. Lake Michigan is fully within the US and Lake Ontario is fully within Canada. Lake Superior is the largest of the lakes. It’s also the fresh water lake with the most surface area of any lake in the world. It contains 10% of the world’s fresh water. The lakes together contain nearly 20% of the fresh water in the world. That means Lake Superior could hold the water from all the other Lakes plus a couple of extra Lake Erie’s thrown in!