Random Waterfall Name Generator

How this random waterfall generator works

Press Generate and you get a waterfall. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them.

Niagara. Victoria. Angel. Iguazú. Kaieteur. Gullfoss. Nohkalikai. Tumpak Sewu.

None of them is the biggest waterfall on Earth. The biggest waterfall on Earth has never been seen by anybody.

The largest waterfall on Earth is underwater

Between Greenland and Iceland runs the Denmark Strait. At the bottom of it, the seabed drops away, and over that drop pours a waterfall.

It works because cold water is denser than warm water. Frigid water flowing south out of the Nordic Seas meets the warmer Irminger Sea, sinks beneath it, and cascades over a ridge on the ocean floor.

The tallest waterfall on land, Angel Falls in Venezuela, drops 3,212 feet. The Denmark Strait cataract is more than three times taller.

And the volume is not comparable to anything. Something over 123 million cubic feet of water goes over it every second, which is orders of magnitude beyond Niagara at full flood.

You would not notice it. The water moves at about half a metre per second, roughly sixty times slower than the water going over Niagara. There is no roar, no spray, no rainbow. A ship passes above it and nobody on board feels a thing.

The biggest waterfall on the planet is silent, invisible, and load-bearing.

Every waterfall is walking upstream

A waterfall is not a feature. It is an event in progress, and the event is the destruction of the cliff it falls over.

Here is the mechanism. Water goes over a lip of hard rock and lands on softer rock beneath. The landing carves out a plunge pool. The plunge pool eats backwards into the cliff face. Eventually the hard lip is undercut so far that it has nothing left to sit on, and it collapses.

The waterfall is now a few metres further upstream than it was.

Do that for ten thousand years and the waterfall has walked a long way up its own valley, leaving a gorge behind it. That gorge is the record of where it used to be. Niagara has one. Every large waterfall has one.

And it ends the way you would expect. A waterfall that keeps retreating eventually wears the whole step out of the river and turns into rapids, and then into nothing. Waterfalls erase themselves. It is the slowest suicide in geology.

What "tallest" means, and why nobody agrees

Angel Falls is usually called the tallest waterfall on land, and the number given is 3,212 feet, 979 metres.

But that number is for the uninterrupted drop, the single free fall. Some waterfalls come down in a series of steps. Do you measure the whole staircase or the tallest step? Tugela Falls in South Africa is measured in tiers, and on that basis has been claimed as taller.

Then there is width, and there is volume, and they give different winners. Victoria Falls is neither the tallest nor the widest, but by the combined measure of height and width it forms the largest single sheet of falling water in the world.

Tallest, widest, biggest. Three questions, three answers, and every list on the internet picks one and calls it the answer.

A waterfall on a border has two names

Water does not respect a frontier, and a waterfall large enough to be famous is often large enough to be shared.

Iguazú Falls and Cataratas do Iguaçu are the same waterfall. One name is Spanish, one is Portuguese. It sits on the border between Argentina and Brazil, and each country calls it by its own name and prints its own signs.

Ban Gioc and Detian are also the same waterfall. It sits on the border between Vietnam and China. Ban Gioc is the Vietnamese name. Detian is the Chinese name. Neither country calls it the other thing.

Niagara straddles the United States and Canada and gets away with one name, mostly because both countries speak English about it. Victoria Falls sits between Zambia and Zimbabwe, and its local name, Mosi-oa-Tunya, means the smoke that thunders, and is older than the English one by an unknown margin.

So a database of the world's waterfalls will always double-count some of them, and the duplicates are never mistakes. They are the border, written down.

Foss

Gullfoss. Skógafoss. Dettifoss. Seljalandsfoss. Svartifoss. Goðafoss. Langfoss.

Foss is the Old Norse word for waterfall, and it survives in Icelandic and Norwegian. So Gullfoss is Golden Falls, Skógafoss is Forest Falls, Svartifoss is Black Falls, and Goðafoss is the Falls of the Gods.

Nearly all of them are in Iceland, a small island country with more waterfalls than most continents, because it is wet, volcanic, and spent the last ice age under a glacier. Every one of those three facts makes waterfalls.

Type foss into the Contains filter and Iceland falls out.

Ways people actually use this

• Travel shortlists. Some of the world's most spectacular places, one click.
• Geography quizzes. Show the waterfall, ask for the country. Kaieteur will not be guessed.
• Photography prompts. Generate one and find out what it looks like before you decide whether to go.
• Worldbuilding. A waterfall means a hard rock layer above a soft one. Put that in your map and the geology falls into place behind it.
• Learning that spectacular is not the same as large. All of these are beaten by a ridge on the seafloor.

Getting more out of the filters

• Type foss into Contains for the Norse names, nearly all of them Icelandic.
• Type Falls and look at what does not come back. Those are named in a language that does not use the word, which is a decent map of who named what.
• Ends with S returns most of the English-named entries at once, because English pluralises a waterfall even when there is only one of it.
• Generate everything and pick the three you have never heard of.

Questions people ask

What is the largest waterfall in the world?

The Denmark Strait cataract, between Greenland and Iceland, entirely underwater. It drops about 11,500 feet, more than three times the height of Angel Falls, and carries a volume no surface waterfall approaches.

What is the tallest waterfall on land?

Angel Falls in Venezuela, at 3,212 feet, if you measure the uninterrupted drop. Tugela Falls in South Africa is measured in tiers and has been claimed as taller. The disagreement is about the method, not the mountain.

How can there be a waterfall underwater?

Because cold water is denser than warm water. Cold water sinks beneath warm water and flows downhill along the seabed, and where the seabed drops away sharply, it falls. No air is involved.

Do waterfalls move?

Yes, upstream. The falling water carves a pool at the base, the pool undercuts the lip, the lip collapses, and the waterfall retreats. The gorge below it is the record of where it has been.

Will waterfalls last forever?

No. A waterfall is a step in a river, and rivers spend their whole existence removing steps. Given enough time every waterfall wears itself down into rapids and then into ordinary river.

References

1. Where is the largest waterfall? NOAA Ocean Service
2. Denmark Strait cataract
3. The world's largest waterfall, hidden underwater