Major Lakes and Waterfalls of the World: Full List

Lakes and waterfalls are examined as pairs: a name with a record, or a name with a river and a country. A lake is simply a body of water standing in a hollow, and the hollow decides the lake character, so the Caspian Sea left behind by a vanished ocean is salty while the Great Lakes scooped out by ice sheets are fresh. A waterfall is a river falling over a break of slope, which is why the great falls of the world sit either where a hard rock band crosses a river or where a plateau edge drops to a plain. This note gives the lakes and falls that papers ask, with the fact attached to each name.

How lake basins are formed

• Tectonic lakes fill rift valleys and down-warped blocks: Baikal in Siberia, Tanganyika and Malawi in the African rift, the Dead Sea in the Jordan rift.
• Glacial lakes occupy hollows gouged by ice: the five Great Lakes of North America, the Finger Lakes, and the countless tarns of the Alps and the Himalaya.
• Volcanic lakes stand in craters and calderas: Lake Toba in Sumatra, the largest of its kind, and Crater Lake in Oregon.
• Fluvial lakes are left by rivers as oxbows and deltaic shallows; Kolleru between the Krishna and Godavari deltas is of this family.
• Lagoons are cut off from the sea by sand bars: Chilika in Odisha and Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela.
• Artificial lakes are reservoirs behind dams: Lake Volta in Ghana, the largest by surface area, Lake Nasser on the Nile and Lake Mead on the Colorado.

The record holders among lakes

The Great Lakes and the Aral Sea

The five Great Lakes, remembered by the word HOMES, are Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior. Lake Michigan is the only one lying wholly within the United States; the other four are shared with Canada. They drain through the St Lawrence river to the Atlantic, and the Saint Lawrence Seaway with its locks carries ocean ships inland to Chicago and Duluth. Between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario the Niagara river drops over the Niagara escarpment, and between Lake Superior and Lake Huron the Soo locks lift ships past the rapids. The Aral Sea in Central Asia is the opposite story: diversion of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya for cotton irrigation shrank it into separate shallow pools, the standard textbook case of a lake destroyed by water management.

The great waterfalls

India in the same picture

Indian names are regularly set as options against the world list, so keep them ready. Wular in Jammu and Kashmir, fed by the Jhelum, is the largest freshwater lake of India; Chilika in Odisha is the largest brackish water lagoon; Vembanad in Kerala is the longest lake of the country; Sambhar in Rajasthan is the largest inland saline lake; Loktak in Manipur carries the floating mats called phumdis and the only floating national park, Keibul Lamjao; Kolleru lies in Andhra Pradesh between the deltas of the Krishna and the Godavari, and Pulicat on the Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu coast is a second great lagoon. Among waterfalls, Kunchikal on the Varahi in Karnataka is reckoned the highest in India, Nohkalikai near Cherrapunji is the highest plunge fall, Jog on the Sharavathi is the best known segmented fall, Dudhsagar lies on the Mandovi in the Western Ghats and Chitrakote on the Indravati in Bastar is called the Niagara of India.

Exam point of view

The questions are of four kinds: the record, the river, the country or border, and the type of basin. Learn each name with all four and no option can trap you.