America's oldest lake is revealed... and famous body of water has been around for 2.3 million years

In a country estimated to have around 124,000 lakes, America is home to the third oldest lake in the world - Lake Tahoe.

And by default, the 191-square-mile body of water takes the cake for North America's oldest freshwater permanent lake.

Lake Tahoe is at least 2.3 million years old, according to Winnie Kortemeier, a professor of geosciences who spoke about the ancient body of water to the Las Vegas Sun. 

Professor at Western Nevada College in Carson City, Kortemeier has been researching Lake Tahoe for nearly two decades.

And as recently as Monday, she presented her creation of a planetwide timeline - which used years of research and scientific data from other published research papers to compare Tahoe with other ancient lakes.

That's when she shared her findings.

'It's just really hard to date a lake,' she told Las Vegas Sun. 'But in Tahoe, it's very clear what the age of the lake is. It has to be older than 2.3 million years.' 

She began her research of Lake Tahoe by studying volcanic rocks in the Tahoe City area.

Figuring out the age of lakes is by no means a straightforward process, but she noted that Lake Tahoe is fortunate that the lava flow interacted with water - allowing the rocks to be dated.

Skylandia Beach, Commons Beach, the cliffs above the town and all the way down to Eagle Rock on the west shore are some of the spots where she collected the volcanic rocks. 

She had first made the discovery in 2012 after she sent five rock samples to the U.S. Geological Survey geochronology laboratory for radiometric dating. 

From there, she discovered that lava flows occurred in the Tahoe Basin at three separate points in time - 2.3 million years ago, 2 million years ago and 920,000 years ago. 

When the lava erupted, it interacted with lake water and sediments in the lake - further evidence pointing to the fact that Lake Tahoe existed at the time of the lava flows.

A common misconception is that Clear Lake is considered to be the oldest lake in North America, but Kortemeier's findings dethrone that claim.

Her research on continuous lake sediments found at Clear Lake puts it at 480,000 years old - significantly younger than Lake Tahoe. 

But she was still surprised when her research revealed Lake Tahoe as the third oldest lake on Earth.

'It's number three in the whole world, because it's really rare to have a lake form this way,' she added.

She placed Lake Baikal, a lake in Siberia, as the world's oldest lake to exist - coming in at roughly 5 million to 10.3 million years old.

The second oldest lake in the world, coming in just before Tahoe, is Lake Tanganyika in East Africa - estimated to be between 8 million and 10 million years old. 

The research for both of these lakes came from their continuous sedimentary sequence - which refers to the layers in the rock. 

All three of the lakes - Baikal, Tanganyika and Tahoe, were created by faults, Kortemeier added, which is an uncommon phenomenon and distinct from other lakes that were created by glaciers.

Baikal, Tanganyika and Tahoe are all fault line lakes that carry similar characteristics to each other - long and skinny.

Lake Tahoe itself is 22 miles long and 12 miles wide.  

Tahoe's deepest area is 1,645 feet deep - making it the second deepest lake in America, next to Oregon's Crater Lake, according to Keep Tahoe Blue. 

'The oldest lakes on the Earth are usually in an active fault basin, where the basin is still being actively faulted and formed,' Kortemeier added. 

'So even if you put sediment in it all the time, the bottom is still being dropped down... and so the basins continue to deepen through time. And that's why you get these ancient, ancient lakes, these really old lakes.'

The Tahoe Basin also has several fault lines that run underneath it, contributing to the reason why the west side of the lake is deeper than the east side.

Overtime, it essentially was pulled apart by the Earth's movement.

'Nevada, in the last 17 million years, has been stretched twice as wide as it started out,' Kortemeier said. 'As that happens, the basins get dropped down. As you stretch the area wider and wider, the basins drop down along faults, and then you're thinning the crust and the mountains get raised due to the whole Great Basin.' 

And because Tahoe has seen volcanic activity within the past million years, it is considered dormant, not extinct or dead. 

Tahoe is also one of the most pure bodies of water in the world with 99.994 percent of the water pure, according to The Landing Tahoe.

And as the second deepest lake in America, the amount of water in the lake is enough to supply each person in the U.S. with 50 gallons of water per day for five years.

If you could take all the water out of Tahoe and pour it into an area that mirrors the size of California, the water would still be 14 inches deep. 

Roughly eight million people live less than a half-day's drive from the Tahoe basin, Keep Tahoe Blue reported. 

Consisting of 12 ski resorts and beautiful views that have been featured as locations for popular films throughout the years, Lake Tahoe is a landmark in the country.

And now, it's the grandfather of American lakes.