Ranked: The World’s Deepest Lakes by Depth
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Key Takeaways
- Only one lake—Baikal—exceeds a mile in depth.
- A steep 1,460-foot drop separates the second and third deepest lakes.
- Lake Vostok ranks fourth despite being buried under 13,000 feet of Antarctic ice.
Lake Baikal plunges to 5,387 feet—making it the only lake on Earth more than a mile deep.
While Lake Tanganyika comes close, a sharp drop follows. The third-ranked Caspian Sea is over 1,400 feet shallower, highlighting how rare extreme lake depth really is.
This visualization ranks the world’s deepest lakes by maximum depth in feet and meters, based on data from WorldAtlas.
Lake Baikal and Lake Tanganyika Stand Apart
As the world’s oldest lake at 25–30 million years old, Lake Baikal in Russia also ranks as the deepest lake, reaching a maximum depth of 5,387 feet. That makes it 564 feet deeper than Lake Tanganyika, which comes in second at 4,823 feet.
The striking depth of these two ancient lakes is attributable to their status as rift lakes, which only occur in tectonically active regions.
| Rank | Lake | Location | Max depth (ft) | Max depth (m) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Baikal | Russia | 5,387 | 1,642 |
| 2 | Tanganyika |     |
4,823 | 1,470 |
| 3 | Caspian Sea |      |
3,363 | 1,025 |
| 4 | Vostok |  |
3,300 | 1,000 |
| 5 | O’Higgins-San Martín |   |
2,742 | 836 |
| 6 | Malawi/Nyasa/Niassa |   |
2,316 | 706 |
| 7 | Issyk Kul |  |
2,192 | 668 |
| 8 | Great Slave |  |
2,015 | 614 |
| 9 | Crater |  |
1,949 | 594 |
| 10 | Matano |  |
1,936 | 590 |
Most lakes are formed by glaciers, as masses of ice carved out depressions in the landscape as they moved slowly.
However, rift lakes like Baikal and Tanganyika occur where the planet’s crust has stretched, cracked, or shifted over millions of years to create deep basins that slowly filled with water. Due to their extreme depth, these lakes contain globally significant volumes of fresh surface water. Lake Baikal alone holds roughly 20% of the world’s unfrozen surface freshwater, underscoring how depth translates into global significance.
Other lakes in the ranking stand out because of their unusual characteristics, from Antarctica’s Lake Vostok, hidden around 13,100 feet under ice in total darkness, to Crater Lake in the United States, which sits in a volcanic crater.
A Sharp Drop Off in Depth
The Caspian Sea, whose brackish water is roughly a third as salty as seawater, ranks as the third deepest lake at 3,363 feet. It’s also the world’s largest lake by surface area.
A major gap of 1,460 feet—the largest in the data set—separates the Caspian Sea from the second largest lake.
After this, the decline becomes much more gradual, with a similar-sized gap (1,427 ft) between third and 10th place lakes in the ranking.
Deep Lakes Span Every Corner of the Globe
The top 10 deepest lakes span a wide geographic range. They include lakes in Russia, Central Asia, North America, South America, Africa, Antarctica, and Southeast Asia.
Several of the world’s deepest lakes even cross political borders.
Lake Tanganyika touches Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and Zambia, while the Caspian Sea borders five countries. O’Higgins-San Martín Lake is shared by Chile and Argentina, and Lake Malawi/Nyasa/Niassa is linked to Mozambique, Malawi, and Tanzania.
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