African Great Lakes

The African Great Lakes are a group of lakes within the East African Rift, including Lake Victoria, the world's second largest freshwater lake by surface area, Lake Tanganyika, the second largest by volume and depth, Lake Malawi, the fourth largest by volume, and Lake Turkana, the largest permanent desert lake and the largest alkaline lake on Earth. Spanning nine to ten countries, among them Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia, the lakes together hold about 31,000 cubic kilometers of water, more than either Lake Baikal or the North American Great Lakes, amounting to roughly a quarter of the planet's unfrozen surface fresh water, and they feed the White Nile, Congo and Zambezi river systems. The lakes are exceptionally biodiverse, home to more than 1,500 species of cichlid fish and, by some estimates, ten percent of the world's fish species, alongside Nile crocodiles, hippopotamuses, elephants and hundreds of endemic bird species. More than fifty million people live around the lakes, and invasive aquatic plants such as water hyacinth have become a significant ecological pressure on the system.