Lake Victoria (Nam Lolwe in Luo; "Nalubaale" in Luganda; Victoria Nyanza in some Bantu language) is one of the African Great Lakes. The lake was named after Queen Victoria by the explorer John Hanning Speke, who was the first European to discover it. Speke accomplished this in 1858, while on an expedition with Richard Francis Burton to locate the source of the Nile River.
With a surface area of 68,800 square kilometres (26,600 sq mi), Lake Victoria is Africa's largest lake by area, and is also the largest tropical lake in the world. Lake Victoria is the world's second largestfreshwater lake by surface area; only Lake Superior in North America is larger. In terms of its volume, Lake Victoria is the world's ninth largest continental lake, and it contains about 2,750 cubic kilometers (2.2 billion acre-feet) of water. Sounds ironic that it is "only" 2258.02 miles apart from Sahara Desert, the largest desert in the world.
Lake Victoria receives its water primarily from direct precipitation and thousands of small streams. The largest stream flowing into this lake is the Kagera River, the mouth of which lies on the lake's western shore. Lake Victoria is drained solely by the Nile River near Jinja, Uganda, on the lake's northern shore.
Lake Victoria occupies a shallow depression in Africa and has a maximum depth of 84 m (276 ft) and an average depth of 40 m (130 ft). Its catchment area covers 184,000 square kilometers (71,040 sq mi). The lake has a shoreline of 4,828 km (3,000 mi), with islands constituting 3.7% of this length, and is divided among three countries: Kenya (6% or 4,100 km2 or 1,600 sq mi), Uganda (45% or 31,000 km2or 12,000 sq mi) and Tanzania (49% or 33,700 km2 or 13,000 sq mi).
Links[]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Victoria