Location: Zimbabwe and Zambia
Height: 354 ft (108 m)
Age: 200 million years
Victoria Falls is an impressive waterfall situated on the border
between Zimbabwe and Zambia. It is one of the most famous natural
landmarks on the African continent. Victoria Falls was formed 200
million years ago due to geological shifts of plated underneath the
Zambezi river. Victoria Falls reaches a height of 354 ft (108 m).
The first European traveler and missionary who visited Victoria
Falls on 16th November 1855 was a Scottish doctor, missionary and an
explorer David Livingstone. He was also the one who named it
Victoria after famous British Queen Victoria who ruled over United
Kingdom at the time. Victoria Falls were rarely visited until 1905
when a railroad was built in its vicinity.
The local native
tribes that lived around Victoria Falls called it "Mosi-oa-Tunya"
that means "Cloud that Thunders". It wasn't considered sacred, but
many tribes superstitious feared approaching these lands. It is
probably more descriptive name given that the sound of rushing water
can be heard at the distance of 40 kilometers. Mist from the falling
water can reach a height of 400 meters. Today Victoria Falls are on
the UNESCO World Heritage List and protected by the official of both
Zambia and Zimbabwe.
General
The first European to see Victoria Falls with his own eyes
was the Scottish missionary and African traveler David Livingstone.
After hearing reports of this waterfall in 1851, four years later, on
November 16, 1855, he landed on the small island that lies just off the
lip over which the Zambezi falls and which today bears the name
Livingstone Island bears. Deeply impressed, he described the waterfall
as "the finest he had ever seen in Africa" and named it Victoria
Falls; in honor of the then British Queen Victoria.
The local
Kololo, however, call the waterfall Mosi-oa-Tunya (in English:
thundering smoke). The name refers to the water spray that rises up to
300 m from the falls and can be seen up to 30 km away. In the immediate
vicinity of Victoria Falls there is even a rainforest that owes its
existence only to the moisture of this spray. This occurs because the
water masses of the Zambezi pour into a 110 m deep and hardly more than
50 m wide gorge with steep basalt rock walls at a width of 1708 m across
the course of the river. This makes the Victoria Falls the widest
continuous waterfall on earth. At the end of the rainy season in
February and March, when the Zambezi River has swollen from rainfall, up
to 10,000 m³/s of water rushes over the northern rim of the gorge, but
the waterfall is also entitled most other months of the year "largest
water curtain on earth". However, at the end of the dry season, in
September and October, the amount of water can drop to just 170 m³/s.
Then only a few rivulets remain from the otherwise raging tide.
Victoria Falls in August (short video)
The Victoria Falls are
considered to be the boundary between the broad upper reaches and the
rather narrow, gorged middle reaches of the Zambezi, which stretches to
the Cahora Bassa Dam in Mozambique.
Since 1934, the Victoria
Falls have been a transboundary protection and since 1972 part of the
Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park. The rather small national park, which is
largely developed for tourism, extends from the falls about 12 km
upstream and covers about 66 km². In addition, Victoria Falls is within
the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, an international
protected area in southern Africa that has existed since March 2012.
A special tourist attraction is the Devil's Pool, a small natural
pool located immediately on the western edge of the falls and which is
open when the water level in the river is low, i. H. in the months of
September to December, can be used relatively safely for swimming.
Zimbabwe is currently planning to build a $300 million amusement
park around the Victoria Falls to attract more tourists.
geology
and formation
The Victoria Falls are both the result and just a
staging post of the Zambezi's retrogressive erosion combined with the
specific regional geology of the southern part of the Southern Province
of Zambia and the adjacent area of Zimbabwe. There is an occurrence of
Karoo basalts, the so-called Batoka Formation, which is crossed by the
Zambezi. The basalts exhibit a rectangular fracture system of roughly
north-south and roughly east-west oriented fractures that intersect in a
grid-like manner. These fissures are filled with sediments (e.g.
sandstone) that were once deposited on the basalts but have now eroded
again.
Compared to basalt, the sediments are significantly less
resistant to erosion and are relatively easily eroded by the river.
Therefore, a wide waterfall is formed where the course of the river
crosses a chasm that runs transversely to the direction of flow. In the
case of Victoria Falls and its geologically most recent predecessors,
this affects east-west oriented fractures, since the river flows in a
north-south direction in this area. If such an east-west chasm is free
of sediment to such an extent that the retreating erosion can spread to
a north-south chasm, the migration of the waterfall towards the source
of the Zambezi continues in this same chasm. The north-south chasm,
which was cleared just before the Victoria Falls were formed, is the
so-called boiling pot at the eastern end of what is now the falls. A
relatively narrow waterfall exists during the clearance of a north-south
divide - until the next east-west divide is reached and, as with
Victoria Falls, the next wide waterfall is formed.
Below Victoria
Falls, the river zigzags through narrow, deep, roughly east-west
oriented gorges connected by rather short north-south oriented sections.
These gorges represent de-sedimentated crevasses in the basalt, and over
the northern rim of each of these gorges spilled a predecessor of the
Victoria Falls.
So while the Zambezi flows in a wide river bed
over the basalts above the Victoria Falls, it actually flows through
them below, channeled through chasms that it has cleared itself over the
past millennia.
At low tide, aerial photos above today's Victoria
Falls already show the east-west rifts in the riverbed where the falls
will be located in 10,000 years.
meaning
After UNESCO's
designation as a World Heritage Site, increased conflict arose over the
potential exploitation of the Zambezi's hydroelectric power potential.
The development of the river as an energy source is of great importance
for both riparian states, as it forms the border between Zambia and
Zimbabwe. The Zambezi River Authority is planning to build another dam
on the Batoka Gorge below the falls. This would be the third major dam
project on the Zambezi, alongside the Kariba Dam and the Cahora Bassa
Dam. Nature conservationists warned of the unique flora and fauna in the
previously undisturbed gorge. With the damming of the river so close to
the falls, they fear not only the impairment of the natural landscape,
but also changes in the gorges below the falls and losses in the
lucrative tourism business.