Longest Rivers, Largest Lakes & Deepest Oceans

Long held to be the longest river on Earth, it flows north through eleven countries and supplies almost all of Egypt's fresh water.

Carries more water than the next seven largest rivers combined; at its mouth it is over 300 km wide and pushes fresh water 160 km out to sea.

The longest river to run entirely within one country, and the busiest inland waterway anywhere.

The Yellow River, named for the loess it carries; historic floods earned it the name China's Sorrow.

The Huang He - cradle of Chinese civilisation, and so laden with loess silt that its bed rises above the surrounding plain.

South America's second longest river, and the spine of the Río de la Plata basin.

The deepest river on Earth, reaching 220 m; it crosses the equator twice, so some part of it is always in a rainy season.

Runs entirely over permafrost; its spring ice jams cause some of the most violent floods anywhere.

Its flow reverses the Tonlé Sap each monsoon, quadrupling that lake and feeding one of the richest inland fisheries on Earth.

The longest tributary river in the world - longer than the Ob it flows into.

The longest river in Canada, frozen for roughly half the year.

Takes a strange boomerang route away from the sea into the Sahara before turning back - a puzzle that confounded European geographers for centuries.

The longest river in North America, nicknamed the Big Muddy for the sediment it once carried before damming.

With the Missouri it drains 40 per cent of the contiguous United States; its delta grows and shifts with every flood season.

Its basin holds the Vasyugan Mire, the largest swamp on Earth.

Europe's longest river and its largest by discharge; it never reaches an ocean, emptying into the landlocked Caspian.

Divides the flat West Siberian Plain from the Central Siberian Plateau and freezes solid for months each year.

The Amazon's largest tributary, itself carrying more water than any river in Europe or North America.

The highway of the Klondike gold rush; it is frozen from October to May.

Cradle of the Indus Valley civilisation and the source of the name India; it feeds the largest irrigation network in the world.

Drains the Great Lakes and, with its seaway, lets ocean ships reach 3,700 km inland.

Forms 2,020 km of the US–Mexico border; so much is drawn off for irrigation that it sometimes fails to reach the sea.

Known in Brazil as the river of national unity, it flows through the dry sertão for most of its course.

Runs 1,700 km across Tibet before turning through the deepest canyon on Earth to reach the plains.

Passes through ten countries and four capital cities - more of each than any other river on Earth.

Forms much of the Russia–China border and is one of the last great undammed rivers in Asia.

One of the longest free-flowing rivers left in Asia, running through gorges up to 5,000 m deep.

The Arabic name of the Euphrates, the western of the two rivers that define Mesopotamia.

With the Tigris it bounds Mesopotamia, where the earliest known cities and writing appeared.

Often counted with the Amazon but technically its own system, emptying beside Marajó, the largest fluvial island on Earth.

Drops over Victoria Falls in a single 108 m curtain, the largest sheet of falling water in the world.

Supports over 400 million people along its banks, the densest river population anywhere, and forms the largest delta on Earth with the Brahmaputra.

Australia's longest river, draining a basin larger than France and Spain together.

Southern Africa's longest river; its mouth is one of the richest diamond deposits on Earth.

Conventionally taken as part of the boundary between Europe and Asia.

Cut the Grand Canyon over roughly six million years; today it is so heavily allocated that it rarely reaches the sea.

Its tea-black water meets the pale Amazon at Manaus and the two run side by side, unmixed, for 6 km.

The fourth longest river in Europe and the trade route that carried the Kyivan Rus.

The West River, main stem of the Pearl River system that drains southern China.

The Irrawaddy - Myanmar's central artery, home to a rare freshwater dolphin that fishes cooperatively with people.

The Congo's largest left-bank tributary, and a major diamond-bearing river.

Connects to the Amazon through the Casiquiare canal - the only natural link between two major river systems on Earth.

The most hydroelectrically developed river system in the world, with more than 400 dams in its basin.

The faster of the two Mesopotamian rivers; Baghdad, Mosul and Nineveh all sit on its banks.

Kipling's great grey-green, greasy Limpopo; it runs only seasonally along much of its length.

Contributes more water to the Mississippi at their junction than the Mississippi itself.

Colombia's principal river and the route by which the interior was settled.

Runs dry in stretches during drought, then floods across the inland plains.

Supplies about 90 per cent of the water entering Lake Chad, which has shrunk dramatically since the 1960s.

The German name of the Rhine, Europe's busiest commercial waterway.

Europe's busiest waterway; the Roman Empire used it as a frontier for four centuries.

Its hunger stones, exposed only in severe drought, carry carved warnings going back to 1616.

Poland's longest river, running past Kraków and Warsaw to the Baltic.

The longest river on the Iberian Peninsula, opening into the wide estuary at Lisbon.

France's longest river, and among the last in Europe still shifting its own sandbanks freely.

Paris grew from a settlement on an island in it; barges still carry a fifth of the region's freight.

Italy's longest river; its plain is the country's agricultural and industrial heartland.

Declared biologically dead in 1957 and now home to seals and seahorses again.

The largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area - enough water to cover both North and South America a foot deep.

Lake Victoria: Africa's largest lake and the chief reservoir of the Nile, yet shallow enough that a bad drought could measurably lower it.

Holds Manitoulin, the largest island in any lake on Earth - which itself contains lakes with islands in them.

The only Great Lake entirely within the United States, and hydrologically one body of water with Lake Huron.

The longest lake in the world at 673 km, and the second deepest; below 200 m it is permanently without oxygen.

The deepest and oldest lake on Earth at around 25 million years, holding roughly a fifth of all unfrozen fresh water on the planet.

The largest lake entirely within Canada; it sits on the Arctic Circle and is ice-covered for eight months a year.

Home to more fish species than any other lake - over a thousand cichlids, most found nowhere else.

The deepest lake in North America; its winter ice is thick enough to carry an ice road for heavy trucks.

The shallowest and warmest Great Lake, so it freezes over most winters and generates enormous lake-effect snow.

A remnant of glacial Lake Agassiz, which once held more water than all of today's lakes combined.

The smallest Great Lake by area but deeper than Erie by far, and it never freezes across.

Europe's largest lake; its frozen surface carried the Road of Life that supplied besieged Leningrad.

Fresh at its western end and saline at its eastern - a narrow strait keeps the two halves from mixing.

Its name means where the water meets the sky; in the wet season lake and swamp become indistinguishable.

Europe's second largest lake, with over 1,600 islands and Neolithic rock carvings along its shores.

Australia's lowest point and usually a dry salt pan; it has filled completely only a handful of times in 150 years.

The largest artificial lake by surface area on Earth, covering about 3.6 per cent of Ghana.

The highest navigable lake in the world at 3,812 m, with floating reed islands the Uros still build and inhabit.

The only freshwater lake with a resident population of sharks, which swim up the San Juan River from the Caribbean.

Its sandstone shore holds the Athabasca Sand Dunes, the most northerly major dune field on Earth.

Formed in a meteorite crater basin, it has more than 5,500 islands.

The world's largest permanent desert lake, and the site where many of the oldest hominin fossils were found.

Its name means warm lake - despite sitting at 1,600 m in the Tian Shan, it never freezes.

The largest lake in the European Union, with some 22,000 islands and skerries.

The largest artificial lake by volume in the world; filling it required relocating 57,000 people.

The largest lake on any island on Earth, on Baffin Island, and frozen for most of the year.

Another remnant of glacial Lake Agassiz, unusually shallow for its size.

The northernmost of the great African rift lakes, and a source of the White Nile.

Once the largest lake in the Middle East, it shrank by around 90 per cent before restoration work began.

Part of the Congo headwaters, and where Livingstone spent his final years of exploration.

The northernmost large lake on Earth, frozen for roughly nine months of the year.

Several times saltier than the ocean; a rail causeway split it into two halves that are now visibly different colours.

China's largest lake, sitting at 3,205 m on the Tibetan Plateau and sacred to Tibetan Buddhists.

The largest freshwater lake in northeast Asia, and a critical stop on the East Asian flyway.

So alkaline that laundry can be washed in it without soap; only one fish species survives there.

Site of the 1242 Battle on the Ice, fought on its frozen surface.

The surviving northern remnant of the Aral Sea, partly restored by a dam after the main body largely dried up.

Its feeder river reverses direction each monsoon, swelling the lake fivefold and driving one of the most productive inland fisheries anywhere.

Holds enormous dissolved methane and carbon dioxide at depth - a hazard, and now a power source.

Covered around 25,000 km² in the 1960s and has lost roughly 90 per cent of that since - one of the starkest shrinkages on record.

One of the largest high-altitude freshwater lakes in the world, at nearly 1,900 m.

Fills the caldera of a supervolcano whose eruption around 232 CE reddened skies as far as China and Rome.

Its surface, around 430 m below sea level, is the lowest exposed land on Earth; nearly ten times saltier than the ocean.

The largest lake in the Alps; the Rhône flows in one end and out the other.

Has no formally agreed border across it - the three countries never settled where their lines run.

Larger than every landmass on Earth put together, and it holds more than half of all the free water on the planet. Its Ring of Fire produces about 90 per cent of the world's earthquakes.

Widening by roughly 2.5 cm a year as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge pushes the Americas away from Europe and Africa. The Gulf Stream that crosses it keeps north-west Europe far warmer than its latitude should allow.

The warmest ocean on Earth, and the only one whose surface currents reverse twice a year, driven by the monsoon.

Recognised as a distinct ocean in 2000. Its Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the largest on Earth, moving more water than all the world's rivers combined.

The smallest and shallowest ocean, and the only one with a permanent - though rapidly shrinking - ice cover.

The largest sea in the world, and it contains the deepest trench outside the Marianas.

Holds the Great Barrier Reef, the largest structure built by living organisms anywhere on Earth.

Carried the monsoon trade routes that linked India, Arabia and East Africa for over two thousand years.

Around a third of all global shipping passes through it, making it the busiest stretch of sea on Earth.

Has the clearest water ever measured in any sea, and produces the dense bottom water that drives global ocean circulation.

Contains the second largest barrier reef in the world and the deepest point in the Caribbean plate boundary.

Dried out almost completely around 5.9 million years ago, then refilled through the Strait of Gibraltar in perhaps a couple of years.

Crossing it is called the ditch in Australia and New Zealand; it sits over the mostly submerged continent of Zealandia.

The largest bay in the world, and home to the Bengal Fan, the biggest submarine sediment fan on Earth.

One of the most biologically productive seas in the world, and the southernmost place in the northern hemisphere with regular sea ice.

The Gulf Stream is born here, and the asteroid that ended the dinosaurs struck its southern rim at Chicxulub.

Generates some of the largest wind-driven waves recorded anywhere, and feeds one of the world's great salmon fisheries.

So much ice once sat on it that the land is still rebounding upward, and local gravity is measurably weaker than average.

Almost fully enclosed, so it has very small tides and its own distinct deep-water mass.

One of the very few places where surface water sinks to the deep ocean, helping drive the global conveyor.

The nursery of most North Atlantic icebergs, calved from Greenland's western glaciers.

Backed by the Ross Ice Shelf, an ice raft the size of France, and now the largest marine protected area on Earth.

Its clockwise gyre traps a vast reservoir of fresh water that, if released, could disrupt Atlantic circulation.

One of the saltiest and warmest seas, sitting in a young rift that is slowly splitting Africa from Arabia.

Below about 150 m it is anoxic - the largest body of oxygen-free water in the world, which preserves ancient shipwrecks almost intact.

Despite the name it is the largest lake in the world - landlocked, brackish, and larger than Germany.

Shallow and extremely saline; roughly a fifth of the world's traded oil passes out through the Strait of Hormuz.