Georgian Bay
This article describes the bay of Lake Huron. The township of Georgian Bay (Ontario) is named after it.
Georgian Bay (French Baie Georgienne, German also Georgsbucht) is a large bay in North America, divided from the main body of Lake Huron by Manitoulin Island to the northwest and Bruce Peninsula to the southwest. It is part of the Canadian province of Ontario.
The bay is about 200 km long and up to 80 km wide. It covers an area of 15,000 square kilometres. Part of this area, 347,000 ha, has been recognized as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 2009. The bay lies on the southern edge of the Canadian Shield, which was shaped by the retreat of glaciers at the end of the last ice age some 11,000 years ago. The western part of the bay with the Bruce Peninsula belongs geologically to the Niagara strata.
The granulite outcropping on Bonnet Island is the only known locality to date (2018) of the extremely rare mineral mencerite-(Y), an yttrium-rich garnet.
Archaeological evidence indicates human occupation of the southern regions of the Canadian Shield dating back to the 7th millennium BC. At the time of the first European immigration in the 17th century, the Ojibwa and Ottawa, who called themselves the Anishinabe, lived here along the north and east shores of the bay. The Wyandot (or Huron) and Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) settled the land south of the bay.
The first Europeans in this region were French explorers Samuel de Champlain and Étienne Brûlé in the 17th century. French Jesuits established Mission Sainte-Marie-au-pays-des-Hurons, Ontario's first European settlement, in 1649 on the site of the present-day community of Midland, Ontario.
Georgian Bay was first mapped in 1815 by Commander William Fitzwilliam Owen, who named the bay "Lake Manitoulin". In 1822 it was given its present name by the British admiral and geodesist Henry Bayfield in honour of King George IV.
Georgian Bay is home to tens of thousands of islands called the Thirty Thousand Islands, including the larger Parry Island and Christian Island. Manitoulin Island, at the northern end of the bay, is the largest island on earth in a lake.
Georgian Bay is the northern terminus of the Trent-Severn Waterway. The southern terminus is the mouth of the Trent River, at Trenton, into Lake Ontario's Bay of Quinte.
