Lakes of the World Posters, Prints, Charts
for social studies classrooms, home schoolers, travelers

Lakes are bodies of water surrounded by land.

Very large bodies of water surrounded by land are sometimes called “seas”, as in the inland Caspian and Dead Seas, which incidently have salt water.

Lakes generally are freshwater, and the majority of lakes on Earth are in the Northern Hemisphere at high latitudes. Canada has 60% of the worlds lakes and the state of Minnesota in the northern US, is known as the ‘Land of 10,000 Lakes’.

Naturally occurring lakes are either fed by rivers or streams, or the collection of water in depressions formed by glaciers, or craters in the calderas of volcanoes. The Great Salt Lake in Utah and the Dead Sea in Israel are examples of how water accumulating in a basin or depression with no outlet, evaporates and concentrates the salt levels. Man-made lakes, or reservoirs, are the result of blocking a stream with a dam (Lake Mead), or carving a depression in the ground, as in a farm pond.

Small bodies of water surrounded by land are generally described as ponds and pools, however the famous Walden Pond in Massachusetts meets all the suggested characteristic of a ‘lake’.

The Caspian Sea is the largest lake in the world by surface area. The Romans called it a sea because it was salty.

The Volga River drains into the Caspian Sea, forming a delta that is the fishing ground for beluga sturgeon, the source of beluga caviar.

The Black Sea is actually a distant arm of the Atlantic Ocean through the Mediterrean Sea and the Bosporus, the strait between European and the Asian parts of Turkey. The land area, an isthmus, between the Black and Caspian Seas, is the site of Mount Elbrus of the Caucacus Mountains.

The Black Sea resort of Yalta was the site of the Yalta Conference, and the port city of Odessa's great stone staircase, now popularly known as the “Potemkin Steps”, the setting of one of the most famous scenes in motion picture history.

Lake Titicaca is the world's highest commercially navigable lake, the largest freshwater lake in South America, and 2nd largest in the world.

Lake Titicaca, in the Andes Mountains, strattles the border between Peru & Bolivia.

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The Great Lakes of Africa - Tanganyika, Victoria, Albert, Edward, Kivu, and Malawi
are a series of lakes in and around the Great Rift Valley in eastern Africa.

Lake Tanganyika is considered the second oldest lake in the world and also the second largest in terms of volume and depth (after Lake Baikal).

Lake Victoria, the source of the White Nile River, is the second largest freshwater lake by surface area (after Lake Superior in the Great Lakes of North America).
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Lake Texcoco (Spanish: Lago de Texcoco) was a shallow natural lake in the Valley of Mexico where the Aztecs built their capital city of Tenochtitlan on a small island surrounded by “floating gardens” or artificial islands (chinampas) made of soil piled on reed mats anchored to the shallow lake bed.

Salt lakes are bodies of water that have water flowing in but do not have an outflow. Water evaporation causes a high concentration of salts. A salt lake an excellent place for salt production, and high salinity will also lead to a unique flora and fauna in the lake.

The nearby Bonneville Salt Flats are the results of the ancient Lake Bonneville.

The Don Juan Pond in Antarctica has such a high salinity that it does not freeze; and crater lake Lac Assal in Djibouti has the world's largest salt reserves.

Louisiana's Lake Pontchartrain is an example of an estuary - a semi enclosed coastal body of water where fresh and salt water mix.

Lake Pontchartrain, the second largest salt water lake in the United States (after Utah's Great Salt Lake) is fed fresh water by five rivers, the salt water enters with the tides from the Gulf of Mexico. The city of New Orleans is on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela is another example of an estuary, however it is really a bay.

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Tonlé Sap, which translates as “great lake” from the Cambodian, is geographically unusual as both a lake and river system.

The fluctuating size of the lake provides an inland fishing ground and natural flood control for the Mekong River. The ancient city of Angkor was located near the northern end of Tonlé Sap.

• Tonlé Sap: The Heart of Cambodia's Natural Heritage
• Peoples of Southeastern Asia Poster Map

The Dead Sea, on the border between the West Bank, Israel, and Jordan, is the lowest point on Earth (1,371 ft).

Fish cannot live in the Dead Sea due to the high salinity of the water caused by the waters of the Jordan River flowing into the lake and there being no outlet.

The Dead Sea is also a rift lake, part of the Great Rift Valley that stretches form Turkey to southern Africa. The oldest continually occupied town in the world, Jericho, is just north of the Dead Sea.

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Crater lakes are the accumulation of water within the caldera of a volcano.

Notable crater lakes - Ojos del Salado - Chile (highest crater lake), Lake Taal - Indonesia, Lake Toba - Sumatra.

Lake Mead was formed by the Hoover Dam impounding the Colorado River. The dam serves as a source of electrical power, Lake Mead provides water for Southern California and cities such as Las Vegas.

The white edge of the reservoir is caused by the “bathtub ring” effect of high water mark. Since 2000 less than average snow fall in the Western Colorado Rockies is dropping the lake level, threatening both power generation and water for cities.

Lake Geneva, (French Lake Léman), is the second largest freshwater lake in Central Europe (after Lake Balaton) and is under both Swiss and French jurisdiction.

Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), whose work eschewed the predominant Romantic & Neoclassical schools of 19th century French painting, coined the term ‘realism’. Courbet chose to work spontaneously, without refinement, which was a visual precursor to the Impressionists.

Walden Pond
National Geographic

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I haven't found an “official” limitations on size that proscribe what body of water surrounded by land can be called a “lake” although I did find “The Highest Lake“, whose author Carl Drews suggests these working definitions of a lake.
1. A lake surface area must be at least 1 hectare, or 2.471 acres.
2. A lake must be at least 2 meters deep somewhere to allow for swimming.
3. A lake must be mostly open water. If you can hike across it, it's not a lake, it's a marsh. **
4. The lake must lbe able to support an environment for fish that last throughout the entire year. (100 cubic meters of liquid water year-round, 10x10 meters by 1 meter deep). A lake may have permanent surface layer of ice, like Lake Vostok in Antarctica
5. Someone has to visit the lake on the ground to verify and document it (this is most difficult for “highest lake” status).