11 Facts About Lake Chad

Lake Chad is a historically large, shallow, endorheic lake in Central Africa, which has varied in size over the centuries.

Lake Chad is mainly in the far west of Chad, bordering on northeastern Nigeria.

The Lake Chad flooded savannas surround the lake, including permanently and seasonally-flooded grasslands, savannas, and woodlands.

Lake Chad has the Bahr el-Ghazal outlet, but its waters percolate into the Soro and Bodele depressions.

The name Lake Chad is derived from the Kanuri word "Sad?" meaning "large expanse of water".

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Lake Chad was first surveyed from shore by Europeans in 1823, and it was considered to be one of the largest lakes in the world then.

Lake Chad has shrunk considerably since the 1960s, when its shoreline had an elevation of about 286 metres above sea level and it had an area of more than 26,000 square kilometres, making its surface the fourth largest in Africa.

Entire Lake Chad basin holds 179 fish species, of which more than half are shared with the Niger River Basin, about half are shared with the Nile River Basin, and about a quarter are shared with the Congo River Basin.

Plans to divert the Ubangi River into Lake Chad were proposed in 1929 by Herman Sorgel in his Atlantropa project and again in the 1960s.

The copious amount of water from the Ubangi would revitalize the dying Lake Chad and provide livelihood in fishing and enhanced agriculture to tens of millions of central Africans and Sahelians.

Human population expansion and unsustainable human water extraction from Lake Chad have caused several natural species to be stressed and threatened by declining lake levels.