The Zambezi’s dam made the world’s largest reservoir by volume
Lake Kariba, filled between 1958 and 1963 behind Kariba Dam, holds about 185 cubic kilometres of water—more than any other artificial lake. Stretching over 223 kilometres along the Zambia–Zimbabwe border, it sits 1,300 kilometres upriver from the Zambezi’s Indian Ocean mouth.
The government of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland ordered the dam, and the rising water drowned the Kariba Gorge upstream of the wall at the lake’s north-eastern end. Width reaches 40 kilometres across 5,580 square kilometres of surface; mean depth is 29 metres and the deepest holes hit 97. That makes a reservoir about four times the size of the one behind China’s Three Gorges Dam. Towns such as Kariba grew for dam workers, while Binga, Mlibizi, Siavonga, and Sinazongwe expanded to house people flooded off the valley floor.
Such a load of water is thought to have triggered earthquakes in an already active zone, more than 20 of them above magnitude 5. Islands such as Fothergill, Spurwing, Chete, Maaze, Mashape and Antelope Island now dot what was once river woodland.
Rotting vegetation during the fill pulsed nutrients into a young food web. Kapenta, a sardine-like fish brought from Lake Tanganyika, now supports a busy commercial fishery and feeds the native tigerfish that draw sport anglers. Nile crocodiles and hippos share the water, and fish eagles and cormorants patrol the margins.
Elephants, lions, cheetahs, leopards and buffalo roam the shores. The southern Matusadona National Park once sheltered both black and white rhinos, but poaching has cut their numbers sharply. Zimbabwe treats its portion of the lake as a recreational park within its wildlife estate, and both countries are courting tourists along their shores.
Source: Lake Kariba
