60 Fun Facts About Waterfalls

Angel Falls, the world's tallest uninterrupted waterfall, is in which country?

Venezuela. The water leaps from Auyán-tepui, a flat-topped mountain, and barely touches its sheer face on the way down; the jungle around it is so dense that most visitors arrive by air.

How many Eiffel Towers, stacked up, would match the drop of Angel Falls?

About three. The falls drop 979 metres and the tower stands some 330, so it takes three to reach the lip; the height was pinned down in 1949 by an expedition led by journalist Ruth Robertson.

Angel Falls is named after Jimmie Angel, who was what?

An American aviator. He spotted the falls from his plane in 1933 while hunting for gold, and in 1937 he landed on the summit, where the wheels sank into boggy ground and his party of four had to walk down through the jungle.

Angel Falls was the main inspiration for Paradise Falls in which 2009 Pixar film?

Up. Director Pete Docter took Pixar artists to the table mountains to sketch them, then toned the scenery down: he said the real rocks and plants were so strange that audiences wouldn't have believed them.

Khone Phapheng in Laos, often listed as the world's widest waterfall, blocks boats on which river?

The Mekong. French colonial crews tried again and again to get steamers past the falls and failed, so they built a short narrow-gauge railway across two islands to carry cargo around them instead.

Inga Falls, often ranked the world's biggest waterfall by flow rate, is on which African river?

The Congo. At Inga the river drops 96 metres, but over a run of roughly 15 kilometres, which is why many lists call it rapids and leave it out of the waterfall rankings altogether.

Earth's largest waterfall by volume is underwater, in the strait between Iceland and which island?

Greenland. In the Denmark Strait, cold, dense Nordic water sinks beneath warmer water and pours more than two kilometres down the sea floor, and none of it shows at the surface.

Which Pacific Northwest falls, 3.5 miles wide and 400 feet high, were carved by Ice Age floods?

Dry Falls. Each time the ice dam holding back glacial Lake Missoula gave way, a flood tore across the land and over this cliff; when the Ice Age ended the water stopped, leaving bare rock.

Niagara Falls lies on the border between Canada and which US state?

New York. By the 1870s private owners on the American bank were charging visitors for a glimpse of the falls, until a campaign led by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted got the state to buy the land in 1885.

Which of Niagara's waterfalls is the largest, carrying about nine-tenths of the river's water?

Horseshoe. It drops about 57 metres and has the force to keep cutting its way upstream, while the thin flow over the American Falls can't even clear the fallen rock piled at its base.

The Niagara River carries Lake Erie's water over the falls and into which other Great Lake?

Ontario. The Niagara River runs north, not south, tumbling over a long limestone escarpment between the two lakes, and from there the water heads out through the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.

Who became the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, on 24 October 1901?

Annie Edson Taylor. The widowed schoolteacher made the ride on her 63rd birthday hoping it would make her fortune, but the fame faded within months and she never earned much from it.

Which French tightrope walker first crossed the Niagara Gorge on a wire in June 1859?

Blondin. He kept coming back with new stunts, crossing blindfolded, on stilts, pushing a wheelbarrow and with his manager on his back, and once he sat down halfway to cook and eat an omelette.

In 2012 which high-wire artist made Niagara's first permitted tightrope crossing in 116 years?

Nik Wallenda. Earlier walkers had all crossed the gorge downstream, but his wire ran right over the brink, and the network showing it live refused to go ahead unless he wore a safety harness, which he normally never did.

What did engineers do to the American Falls at Niagara in June 1969?

Diverted the river to dry them up. A temporary dam kept the rock face bare until November while engineers studied whether to clear the boulders heaped at its foot, and in the end they left them where they lay.

The only recorded complete stoppage of Niagara Falls happened in March 1848; what caused it?

An ice jam on Lake Erie. Wind packed the lake's ice into the mouth of the river and plugged it, and for more than a day the falls went quiet, the waterwheels stopped and the mills along the banks shut down.

Niagara Falls once retreated over a metre a year; what slowed it to a fraction of that?

Hydropower drawing off the river. A large part of the flow vanishes into tunnels well above the brink and comes out at power stations downstream, and the thinner sheet left behind wears the rock back far more slowly.

Victoria Falls lies on which southern African river?

The Zambezi. In flood the river throws up a column of spray hundreds of metres high that shows from far across the plain, which is why the local name, Mosi-oa-Tunya, means "the smoke that thunders".

Which Scottish missionary named Victoria Falls after the queen in 1855?

David Livingstone. Local boatmen paddled him to an island on the very brink of the falls, where he crept to the edge to peer down into the chasm; the island now carries his name.

Victoria Falls is often ranked first among the world's waterfalls on what basis?

The biggest single sheet of falling water. Plenty of falls are taller, but here the whole river drops 108 metres along a front about 1,700 metres wide, roughly double Niagara on both counts.

What is the 'Devil's Pool' on the Zambian side of Victoria Falls?

A natural rock basin at the lip. When the river runs low late in the year, a rock ledge right on the brink holds back the current, and swimmers can lie at the very edge and look straight down the drop.

Iguazu Falls sits on the border between which two countries?

Argentina and Brazil. Paraguay only just misses out: about 20 kilometres downstream the Iguazu runs into the Paraná, and the spot where the two rivers meet is where all three countries touch.

What is the name of the narrow chasm that swallows much of the Iguazu River?

The Devil's Throat. It is the highest part of the falls, a drop of about 80 metres, and the water lands so hard that a cloud of mist boils back up far above the rim and keeps the forest around it soaked.

Which US First Lady reportedly exclaimed 'Poor Niagara!' on seeing Iguazu Falls?

Eleanor Roosevelt. Guidebooks love the line, and the comparison holds up: the tallest drops at Iguazu reach 82 metres and its rim runs for 2.7 kilometres, nearly three times as wide as Niagara's.

The name Iguazu comes from Guarani words meaning what?

Big water. The Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca reached the falls in the early 1540s and christened them the Falls of Santa María, but the name faded and the Guarani one outlasted it.

Tugela Falls, which spills off the Drakensberg escarpment and may be the world's tallest waterfall, is in which country?

South Africa. The long-quoted height is 948 metres, but a Czech survey team in 2016 measured 983, four more than Angel Falls' 979, and set about getting the record lists to swap the two.

Yosemite Falls is one of North America's tallest waterfalls; what usually happens to it by late summer?

It dries up. The falls run on melting snow, so they thunder in May and June and have usually shrunk to a trickle or to bare rock by August, until the autumn storms start them again.

Kaieteur Falls, a sheer 226-metre drop deep in the rainforest, is in which South American country?

Guyana. The Potaro River goes over the edge of a sandstone plateau in a single leap roughly four times the height of Niagara, and the spot is so remote that most visitors arrive from the capital by chartered plane.

The name of Gullfoss, one of Iceland's most famous waterfalls, means what?

Golden Falls. When investors leased it for a power plant, farmer's daughter Sigríður Tómasdóttir walked to Reykjavík time and again to fight them and is said to have threatened to jump in; the scheme fell through and no plant was built.

Iceland's Dettifoss waterfall appears in the opening scene of which Ridley Scott film?

Prometheus. Scott said he had gone to Iceland to shoot "the beginning of time", and the falls, 100 metres wide and grey with glacial silt, play an unnamed planet where an alien gives up its body to seed life.

In Icelandic legend, what did the settler Þrasi hide at Skógafoss?

A chest of gold. Locals are said to have caught hold of the ring on its side once, but it came away in their hands and the chest sank back; the ring hung for years on the church door at Skógar and is now in the museum there.

What can visitors do at Seljalandsfoss in Iceland that makes it unusual?

Walk behind the falls. A path loops through a hollow in the cliff, which was the coastline before the sea drew back, and the water is melt from Eyjafjallajökull, the ice-capped volcano whose 2010 eruption grounded flights across Europe.

Which waterfall near Schaffhausen in Switzerland is often called the most powerful in Europe?

The Rhine Falls. They are only about 23 metres high; the power comes from volume, with the whole river, 150 metres across, pushing about 600,000 litres a second over the edge in summer.

Italy's Marmore Falls, often called the world's tallest man-made waterfall, were created by whom?

The ancient Romans. In 271 BC a consul had a channel cut to drain a marsh, sending the river Velino over a cliff into the Nera; today a power station takes most of the water, and the falls run at full force only when the gates are opened.

The Krimml Waterfalls drop 380 metres in three stages in Hohe Tauern National Park; they are the highest in which country?

Austria. They are fed by a glacial stream, so their flow swings wildly with the seasons: in June and July they carry around forty times as much water as in the depths of February.

Plitvice Lakes National Park, a chain of tufa lakes linked by waterfalls, is in which country?

Croatia. The lakes built their own dams: the water is so rich in dissolved limestone that it crusts over the moss and algae it runs across, and the barriers are still growing, and the falls with them.

Huangguoshu, often called China's largest waterfall, lies in which part of the country's rainy south-west?

Guizhou. The province gets abundant rain, long cloudy spells and little sunshine, and all that water has carved its limestone plateau into a maze of gorges, caves and underground rivers, with this waterfall as the showpiece.

Ban Gioc–Detian Falls straddle the border between which two countries?

China and Vietnam. The line through the falls was one of the last stretches of their border the two countries settled, in talks that dragged on to the end of 2008 and beyond, some three decades after they fought a war along it.

The Blue Nile Falls in Ethiopia are known locally as Tis Abay, usually translated as what?

Great smoke. The name comes from the spray the river throws up in the rains, when the falls spread to some 400 metres across; in the dry months a hydroelectric station upstream takes much of the water and they shrink to a trickle.

Nohkalikai Falls, India's tallest plunge waterfall, is in which rain-soaked state whose name means "abode of clouds"?

Meghalaya. No great river feeds the falls: they run on rain collected on a small plateau above, which is plenty, because nearby Cherrapunji is one of the wettest places on Earth.

Jog Falls, one of India's most famous, splits into four cascades known as Raja, Roarer, Rocket and what?

Rani. Each name fits: Raja, the king, drops in one unbroken column, Roarer crashes into him halfway down, Rocket shoots out in jets, and Rani, the queen, slides quietly down in a sheet of foam that earned her the nickname the White Lady.

Multnomah Falls, the tallest waterfall in Oregon, is in which scenic area?

The Columbia River Gorge. The falls are fed mainly by underground springs, and the footbridge between the two tiers was paid for by a Portland lumber baron, Simon Benson, who also gave the land around them to the city as a park.

Havasu Falls in the Grand Canyon owes its vivid blue-green colour to what?

High calcium carbonate content. The water itself is clear: the mineral settles out as a pale crust on the creek bed and light bouncing off it turns the pools turquoise, which is why the Havasupai are the "people of the blue-green waters".

Shoshone Falls on the Snake River in Idaho is nicknamed what?

The Niagara of the West. It is best seen in spring: so much of the Snake is taken out upstream to water farmland that by late summer the falls can be a shadow of themselves.

Why did the Guaíra Falls on the Paraná, once among the world's biggest, disappear in 1982?

The Itaipu Dam reservoir. As the dam went up on the Brazil-Paraguay border, thousands of visitors travelled to the falls for a last look before the rising lake covered them for good.

Celilo Falls, where tribes netted salmon for millennia until a Columbia River dam drowned it, lay between Oregon and which state?

Washington. The Columbia is the state line here, and on 10 March 1957 the gates of The Dalles Dam swung shut; within hours the falls lay silent under the rising lake, along with fishing platforms families had handed down for generations.

Sutherland Falls, a 580-metre giant in Fiordland, is a side trip from which New Zealand hiking track?

Milford. The falls drop from Lake Quill in three leaps, and they are named for Donald Sutherland, a prospector who lived as a hermit at Milford Sound and came upon them in 1880 while hunting for a route inland.

Wallaman Falls, usually listed as Australia's tallest single drop, is in the tropical north of which state or territory?

Queensland. The falls lie in the Wet Tropics, a World Heritage strip holding some of the oldest rainforest on Earth, a living remnant of the forest that once covered Australia and part of Antarctica.

In northern England a waterfall is often called a 'force', as in High Force; the word comes from which language?

Old Norse. Viking settlers brought their word fors, which has nothing to do with the everyday word force, a borrowing from French that goes back to Latin; in Iceland the same word became foss.

What do geographers call the ice-carved side canyons whose streams spill into Yosemite as its big waterfalls?

Hanging valleys. A small side glacier cuts far less deeply than the main one it feeds, so when the ice melts its floor is left stranded high up the wall and its stream has a cliff to fall over.

Which fictional character apparently plunged to his death at Switzerland's Reichenbach Falls?

Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle killed him off in 1893 to free himself for more serious writing, but some 20,000 readers reportedly cancelled their magazine subscriptions, and ten years later he gave in and revealed that Holmes never fell.

Which architect built the house called Fallingwater directly over a waterfall in Pennsylvania?

Frank Lloyd Wright. His clients, a Pittsburgh department-store family, expected a house facing their favourite falls and were startled when he set it right on top, arguing that they should live with the waterfall, not just look at it.

In which erosion process do whirlpools below a waterfall spin stones round to grind deep pits into the bedrock?

Potholing. The trapped stones act like a drill bit, grinding round and round until they have bored a rounded shaft into solid rock, and meltwater did the same beneath Ice Age glaciers to leave the big holes called giant's kettles.

Which North American bird often nests on damp rock ledges behind waterfalls?

Black swift pairs choose the spray zone because predators can rarely reach the sheltered ledges there, and the same nest site may be reused for years.

Which explorer's crew laid bets on whether a white streak high on Guadeloupe was rock or falling water?

Christopher Columbus reached Guadeloupe in 1493, where his fleet's doctor wrote of a fall that seemed to drop from the sky; it was Carbet Falls, likely the first waterfall Europeans recorded in the Americas.

A mermaid's curse reportedly kept villagers quiet about the Gocta Cataracts until 2006 in which country?

Peru's Gocta Cataracts had been known to locals for centuries, yet the outside world learned of them only when German explorer Stefan Ziemendorff had them measured and held a press conference in 2006.

Which Japanese waterfall, the country's tallest single drop, is venerated as home to a Shinto deity on the Kumano pilgrimage?

Nachi Falls drops 133 metres and was itself the area's original sacred site: locals venerated the water long before the Kumano Nachi shrine was built nearby.

Manawaiopuna Falls, where the helicopter lands in Jurassic Park, is on which Hawaiian island?

Kauai's Manawaiopuna Falls can be reached only by helicopter, so fans arrive the way the film's visitors did: since 2009 one tour operator has been allowed to set passengers down at its foot.

Which country's Vrtoglavica cave shaft, a 603-metre sheer drop, holds what is thought to be the tallest underground waterfall?

Slovenia's Vrtoglavica, on the Kanin plateau by the Italian border, is named from the Slovene word for vertigo: its single 603-metre pitch is the deepest known, and meltwater falls some 400 metres down it.

Which TV series shows the Pacific Northwest's Snoqualmie Falls in its opening titles?

Twin Peaks made the falls and the lodge above them famous; in 2019 the Snoqualmie Tribe, who hold the place sacred, bought the lodge and the land around it for $125 million, halting a planned hotel and more than 100 homes.