Ranked strictly by maximum depth, not surface area — Africa's two deepest lakes, Tanganyika and Malawi, both make the world's top five, while Lake Victoria, the continent's biggest lake by far, is only about 81 m deep and misses the cut. The rest are Rift Valley lakes, small volcanic crater lakes, and one Namibian sinkhole.
Pictured: Lake Tanganyika in East Africa's Great Rift Valley, #1 at 1,470 m deep.
| Rank | Lake | Max Depth | Country | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lake Tanganyika | 1,470 m | Tanzania, DR Congo, Burundi, Zambia | Rift |
| 2 | Lake Malawi (Nyasa) | 706 m | Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania | Rift |
| 3 | Lake Kivu | 485 m | DR Congo, Rwanda | Rift |
| 4 | Lake Shala | 266 m | Ethiopia | Caldera |
| 5 | Lake Kyaninga | 220+ m | Uganda | Crater |
| 6 | Lake Nyos | 208 m | Cameroon | Crater |
| 7 | Lake Zengena | 166 m | Ethiopia | Crater |
| 8 | Lake Guinas | 130 m | Namibia | Sinkhole |
| 9 | Lake Edward | 117 m | DR Congo, Uganda | Rift |
| 10 | Lake Barombi Mbo | 111 m | Cameroon | Crater |
| 11 | Lake Turkana | 109 m | Kenya, Ethiopia | Rift |
| 12 | Lake Chala | 98 m | Kenya, Tanzania | Crater |
| 13 | Lake Monoun | 96 m | Cameroon | Crater |
| 14 | Lake Bishoftu | 87 m | Ethiopia | Crater |
No matching rows.
How this list works. Lakes are ranked by maximum depth: the deepest point ever measured below the water's surface. Only natural lakes count, so reservoirs held back by dams, such as Lake Nasser, Lake Kariba and Lake Volta, are left out. “Type” says how each basin formed: a rift lake fills a crack in the Earth's crust along the East African Rift, a crater or caldera lake fills a volcanic hollow (a caldera is the much larger kind, left when a volcano collapses), and a sinkhole lake fills a collapsed cave. Small lakes are often surveyed only once, and water levels rise and fall, so published depths differ by a few metres. Where sources disagree, this list uses the most recent survey or scientific source: Lake Kivu is also given as 475–480 m, Lake Edward as 112 m, Lake Nyos as 210 m, Lake Chala as 92–97 m and Lake Monoun as 99 m.[3][9][6][12][13] Lake Kyaninga's survey found “more than 220 m”, so it could be a little deeper, and Lake Guinas drops into flooded caves, so its depth comes from divers rather than a full survey.[5][8] Lake Tanganyika and Lake Malawi use the same figures as RList's world ranking. Two lakes are left out because no survey backs their depth: Madagascar's Lake Tritriva (reported anywhere from 80 to 160 m) and Ethiopia's Wonchi crater lake (claims range up to 400 m).[14] The list stops at 14 because the next three lakes are practically tied at about 81 m: Ethiopia's Lake Hayq (81 m in a 2009 survey, 88 m in 1938), Lake Victoria and Ghana's Lake Bosumtwi.[15]
The world's second-deepest lake after Siberia's Baikal, and at 673 km the longest freshwater lake on Earth, shared by four countries. It holds about 16% of the world's available fresh water, but most of that water holds no fish at all: below roughly 100 m in the north and 250 m in the south there's no oxygen. The shallower layers make up for it, with at least 250 kinds of cichlid fish found nowhere else.[1]
Home to more fish species than any other lake in the world, including at least 700 kinds of cichlid and perhaps as many as 1,000. Its deepest point lies in a depression in the north-central part of the lake, though fish stick to the top 250 m or so, where there's oxygen. Malawi and Tanzania still disagree over where the border runs: Tanzania says it follows the middle of the lake, while Malawi claims the whole surface right up to the Tanzanian shore.[2]
Its deep water holds an estimated 65 km³ of dissolved methane and about 256 km³ of carbon dioxide, which makes it one of only three lakes known to be capable of a gas eruption, alongside Lake Nyos and Lake Monoun further down this list. Rwanda has turned the danger into a resource: since 2016 the KivuWatt plant has pumped gas-rich water up from the depths to generate electricity. Scientists keep a close eye on the gas, since roughly two million people live around the lake.[3]
The deepest of Ethiopia's Rift Valley lakes and the biggest by volume, holding about 36.7 km³ of water. It partly fills the O'a caldera, the largest volcanic caldera in Ethiopia's rift, which collapsed about 240,000 years ago. The volcano still breathes: hot, sulphurous springs along the shore send up steam, and the lake's islands are breeding grounds for great white pelicans in Abijatta-Shalla National Park.[4]
Covering just 24 hectares, this volcanic crater lake near Fort Portal in western Uganda is tiny next to the giants above it, yet its northern basin plunges past 220 m, making it the deepest known crater lake of its kind in the region (its southern basin is only 58 m deep). Below about 100 m its water never mixes with the layers above, and scientists logging its temperature through 2007–08 found it low in nutrients and algae.[5]
On the night of August 21, 1986, this crater lake in north-west Cameroon released a huge cloud of carbon dioxide that rolled down the valleys and suffocated 1,746 people and about 3,500 livestock up to 25 km away. Since 2001 a pipe has drawn gas-rich water up from about 203 m down so the gas can escape safely, and two more pipes were added in 2011; by 2015 the dissolved carbon dioxide had fallen to roughly a quarter of its 2001 level.[6]
A near-perfect circle about 1 km across, sitting at 2,500 m in the highlands of Ethiopia's Amhara Region, just off the Addis Ababa–Bahir Dar highway between Injibara and Kessa. It most likely formed when a volcanic explosion blew out a crater that then collapsed, and its rim is made of loose volcanic ash. Ethiopian hydrogeologist Tenalem Ayenew's book on the country's lakes puts it at 166 m, second in Ethiopia only to Lake Shala.[7]
One of only two permanent natural lakes in Namibia, this sinkhole formed when the roof of an underground karst cave collapsed, about 38 km west of the mining town of Tsumeb. Its walls drop away into flooded caves, so no weighted line can find the bottom; its depth comes from divers, and an underwater robot called Sunfish mapped its caverns in 2019. It's the only natural home of the critically endangered Guinas tilapia.[8]
Mostly shallow, at about 17 m on average, but a trench close to its western, Congolese shore reaches about 117 m. The lake sits inside two national parks, Virunga in DR Congo and Queen Elizabeth in Uganda, and was officially called Lake Idi Amin from 1973 until the Ugandan dictator's fall in 1979. The Ishango bone, a notched baboon bone about 20,000 years old that's often called one of the oldest counting tools ever found, turned up in 1950 at Ishango, where the lake drains into the Semliki River.[9][10]
A volcanic crater lake near the town of Kumba in south-west Cameroon, famous among biologists for its 11 cichlid species found nowhere else, long held up as a textbook case of new species evolving within a single lake. There's almost no oxygen below about 40 m, so most fish stay near the surface; one, Konia dikume, has unusually oxygen-rich blood that lets it dip into the dead zone to feed. It became a protected Ramsar wetland in 2006.[11]