Named after a pilot who crashed on top
The highest waterfall in the world, ANGEL Falls in Venezuela, drops 979 metres from the top of a flat-topped mountain, so far that much of the water turns to MIST before it reaches the bottom. It is named after Jimmie Angel, an American pilot searching for gold, who landed his small plane on the mountain top in 1937. The wheels sank into the soggy ground, and he and his three passengers had to walk for eleven days to get back down. The local Pemón name is Kerepakupai Merú, the fall from the deepest place.
The smoke that thunders
VICTORIA Falls, on the Zambezi River between Zambia and Zimbabwe, is about 1.7 kilometres wide and over 100 metres high, making the largest single sheet of falling water on Earth. The local name, Mosi-oa-Tunya, means the smoke that thunders, and the SPRAY can be seen from tens of kilometres away. The Scottish explorer David Livingstone was the first European to see it, in 1855, and named it after Queen Victoria. In the dry season, brave swimmers sit in a natural rock pool, called the Devil's Pool, right at the edge of the drop.
IGUAZU Falls, on the border of Argentina and Brazil, is not one fall but around 275 separate ones spread along almost three kilometres. When Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the American president, first saw it, she is said to have exclaimed, poor Niagara. Its most dramatic section, the Devil's Throat, is a narrow U-shaped chasm where fourteen falls pour in together.
Niagara in a barrel, and switched off
NIAGARA Falls, between Canada and the United States, is made of three falls, the largest of which is the curved HORSESHOE Falls. In 1901 a sixty-three-year-old schoolteacher, Annie Edson Taylor, became the first person to go over it in a barrel and survive, hoping to make her fortune. She came out bruised and dazed and said nobody should ever try it again. In 1969 engineers built a temporary dam and turned off the smaller American Falls for several months to study the rocks, leaving a bare, dripping CLIFF. Once, in March 1848, the falls fell almost silent by themselves, when an ice jam upstream blocked the river for more than a day and people walked out on the riverbed.
Waterfalls move backwards. The falling water wears away the rock at its base, and the edge collapses, so Niagara has crept about eleven kilometres upstream since the end of the last Ice Age, carving a GORGE behind it.
The biggest waterfall is underwater
The largest waterfall on Earth cannot be seen at all. Beneath the sea between Greenland and Iceland, very cold, heavy water from the north pours over an undersea ridge and sinks about three and a half kilometres, carrying far more water than all the world's rivers put together. A CATARACT is a large, powerful waterfall, a CASCADE falls in steps, and a TIER is one of those steps. Each PLUNGE ends in a BASIN, and the ROAR, the RAINBOW in the spray, the RAPIDS, the TORRENT, the FLOW, the CURRENT, the DROP and the PLUMMET make up the rest of the grid. Our rivers page follows the water that feeds them.