A CodeSights flagship for the geospatial crowd and a companion to Every River: 151 of the world's major lakes with a dense column set pulled from each lake's infobox. Beyond surface area it carries maximum and mean depth, volume, surface elevation, length, width, shoreline, catchment area, residence time, the primary inflow and outflow rivers (join them to Every River), island count, water type, continent and coordinates. The famous finding is that you cannot rank the world on one number, because area, volume and depth crown three different lakes. The Caspian Sea is largest by area (389,000 km2) and by volume (78,200 km3) because it is a salt sea the size of a country, but Lake Baikal is the deepest on Earth at 1,642 m and the largest freshwater lake by volume (23,610 km3), holding more water than Lake Superior and nearly as much as all five Great Lakes combined, while Superior is the largest freshwater lake by area. Elevation spans from the Dead Sea at 440 m below sea level to Andean and Tibetan lakes near 4,000 m and two subglacial Antarctic lakes beneath the ice. Water type splits 139 fresh, 10 salt and 2 soda, coordinates cover most rows for mapping, and the inflow and outflow rivers turn the file into a network. Ten acceptance tests anchored on the Caspian, Baikal and Superior.
151 rows in one CSV file, with 21 columns in total: Lake, Lake_ID, Water_Type, Countries, Continent, Area_km2, Max_Depth_m, Mean_Depth_m, Volume_km3, Elevation_m, Length_km, Width_km, Shoreline_km, Catchment_km2, Residence_Time, Primary_Inflow, Primary_Outflow, Islands_Count, Latitude, Longitude, Lake_URL.
It is built by programmatically scraping en.wikipedia.org, last pulled on 2026-10-16. Datasets are versioned; older versions stay downloadable.
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Yes. The exact Python scraper that built it is viewable on the dataset page by any signed-in member, so every number is reproducible.
Primary_Inflow and Primary_Outflow join Every River on river name; Latitude and Longitude map each lake.
Automated scraping leaves room for error and the underlying sources change over time, so no version is guaranteed accurate or complete. If a number matters, verify it against the original source.