Because of its depth and relative ease of access, the US Navy uses Seneca Lake to perform test and evaluation of equipment ranging from single element transducers to complex sonar arrays and systems.

Seneca's two main inlets are Catharine Creek at the southern end and the Keuka Lake Outlet.

Seneca Lake was formed at least two million years ago by glacial carving of streams and valleys.

It is presumed that the Finger Lakes were created by many advances and retreats of massive glaciers that were up to 2 miles thick.

During the American Revolutionary War, their villages, including Kanadaseaga ("Seneca Castle"), were wiped out during the 1779 Sullivan Expedition.

Their millions of acres were sold and some lands in this area were granted to veterans of the army in payment for their military service.

The ship attempted to rope the monster and tow it back to shore, but it sank to the bottom of Seneca Lake.

The older paintings, located on the bottom of the cliff, were said to have been drawn in 1779 after the Senecas escaped men from John Sullivan's campaign.

There are two mistakes in these 1929 additions: firstly the Native Americans in the Seneca Region used longhouses and not tee-pees,[10] and secondly the flag is displayed pointing to the left which is never to be done on a horizontal surface.

[11] Seneca Lake is also the site of strange and currently unexplained cannon-like booms and shakes that are heard and felt in the surrounding area.

[13] The east side of Seneca Lake was once home to a military training ground called Sampson Naval Base, primarily used during World War II.

A scale model of the sonar section of the nuclear submarine USS Seawolf (SSN 21) was tested during the development of this ship, [16] which was launched in June, 1995.

Its coordinates are: latitude: 42°41'49.99"N, longitude: 76°55'29.93"W. The buoy has cellular modem communications and measures wind speed and direction, relative humidity, air temperature, barometric pressure, light intensity, and the water's depth and temperature, conductivity, turbidity, and chlorophyll-a levels.

[18] On June 30, 2022, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation denied a request for an air permit for a natural gas power plant owned by Greenidge Generation, a bitcoin mining company, on the lake used for powering an 8,000-machine operation which the company argued had no legal basis and would challenge in court in a press statement.