Rising Waters Swamp Lake Naivasha

Kenya's Lake Naivasha has long been a place of change and reinvention. In precolonial times, the nomadic Maasai people used the lake and surrounding grasslands to water and raise cattle during the dry season. The Maasai were eventually displaced by British colonists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including a group of free-thinking aristocrats who arrived in large numbers in the 1920s through 1940s. Known as the Happy Valley set , these newcomers cultivated lavish estates and were notorious for reveling in a culture of excess. Their influence faded in the 1950s and 1960s amid scandal and the overthrow of colonial rule, allowing the area to transform into a center of wildlife tourism, flower farming , and geothermal energy production. Now the lake faces another major change: rapidly fluctuating water levels. The name Naivasha comes from a Maasai word meaning "that which heaves," an apt description of the freshwater lake over the past 25 years. Satellite altimetry measurements of the lake's depth indicate an increase of about 7 meters (23 feet) since 2010, roughly the height of a two-story building. Over the same period, Landsat observed a roughly 40 percent increase in the lake's area, adding 50 square kilometers (19 square miles) of water, equivalent to roughly 15 Central Parks. The human and economic toll of the rising water levels is considerable, said Mathew Herrnegger, a hydrologist at BOKU University in Vienna, Austria. …