Canada contains more lakes than the rest of the world combined.

Canada is home to an estimated two million or more lakes, a number so large that it’s commonly cited as exceeding the total number of lakes in every other country on Earth put together. The country’s landscape owes this abundance largely to glaciation: retreating ice sheets during the last ice age scoured out countless basins and left behind uneven, poorly drained terrain across the Canadian Shield, ideal conditions for lakes to form.

Many of these lakes are small and unnamed, scattered across remote areas of northern Canada that few people ever visit, which is part of why the exact count varies between estimates depending on the minimum size used to define a “lake.” Even by conservative counts, though, Canada’s share of the world’s fresh surface water is disproportionately enormous relative to its population.