How Lake Malawi Compares To The Great Lakes
On the far side of the world from Michigan and Superior sits another colossal freshwater lake, one that can go toe to toe with North America's famous inland seas, and in one dramatic way, absolutely blows them away. Meet Lake Malawi, the shimmering "Lake of Stars" of East Africa. Here is how this African giant actually stacks up against the mighty Great Lakes.
Size: Smaller, But Still Huge
Let's start with footprint. Lake Malawi covers about 29,600 square kilometers, which makes it the ninth-largest lake in the entire world. Impressive, but if you dropped it into the Great Lakes lineup, it would rank only around the middle of the pack: larger than both Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, yet smaller than Superior, Michigan, and Huron. Taken together, the five Great Lakes sprawl across roughly eight times more surface area than Malawi. So on sheer size, the North American squad clearly wins.
Depth: Malawi Wins Easily
Here is where Malawi flips the script hard. It plunges to a maximum depth of 706 meters, or about 2,316 feet, which is dramatically deeper than any of the Great Lakes. Even Lake Superior, the deepest of the five, bottoms out at around 406 meters, barely more than half as deep. The reason is geological: Lake Malawi is a rift lake, sitting in a gigantic crack where the African continent is slowly tearing itself apart, while the Great Lakes were merely scraped out, relatively shallowly, by retreating ice-age glaciers.
Volume: Deeper Beats Wider
All that depth means Lake Malawi punches far above its surface area when it comes to actual water. It holds roughly 8,400 cubic kilometers, which is more than any single Great Lake except Superior. In other words, Malawi contains more water than Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario do individually. That works out to about 37 percent of all the water held in the five Great Lakes combined, squeezed out of a lake with only a small fraction of their total footprint. Depth, it turns out, beats width.
Biodiversity: Malawi Crushes the Great Lakes
This is where the African lake laps the competition. Lake Malawi is home to somewhere between 700 and well over 1,000 species of fish, the most of any lake anywhere on Earth, and the overwhelming majority of them, its dazzling cichlids, are found nowhere else in the world. By comparison, all five Great Lakes host only around 150 or so native fish species between them. Malawi's warm, ancient waters are a riot of colorful, wildly diverse life, while the chilly Great Lakes look almost empty next to it. It is not a close contest.
Age: Ancient vs Newborn
The reason for that staggering biodiversity gap comes down to time. Lake Malawi is an ancient lake, part of a rift system that has been slowly evolving for well over a million years, which has given its fish an enormous stretch of time to split and specialize into a spectacular number of species. The Great Lakes, on the other hand, are practically geological newborns, only about 14,000 years old, carved out by glaciers at the end of the last ice age. There simply has not been anywhere near enough time for that kind of explosion of life to take hold. Two sets of great lakes, on two different continents, each astonishing in its own right, one built on scale, the other on sheer, ancient abundance.
