A drowning world: Kenya's quiet slide underwater
One of the first scientists to realise that something was wrong with the lakes was a geologist named Simon Onywere. He came to the topic by accident. Between 2010 and 2013 he had been studying Lake Baringo, Kenya’s fourth-largest lake by volume. The bones of residents of the area around the lake weaken uncommonly fast, and Onywere was investigating whether this may be linked to high fluoride levels in the water. Then, in early 2013, while he was meeting with residents of Marigat, a town near the lake, one old man stood up. “Prof,” he said. “We don’t care about the fluoride. What we want to know is how the water has entered our schools.”
Curious to know what the man was talking about, Onywere visited the local Salabani primary school. There, he found the lake lapping through the grounds of the school. Nonplussed, he took out his map. He looked at the location of the lake and the location of the school, and wondered how the lake had moved 2km without it becoming news. Onywere rushed back to Nairobi, where he and his colleagues at several Kenyan universities studied recent satellite images of the lake. The images showed that the lake had, in the past year, flooded the area around it. Then Onywere searched for images of some of the lakes nearby: Lakes Bogoria, Naivasha and Nakuru. All of these had flooded. As he extended his search, he saw that Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest lake, had flooded, too. So had Lake Turkana, the largest desert lake in the world.
By September 2013, after further investigation and mapping, it was clear to Onywere and his colleagues how extreme the damage was. In Baringo, schools had been flooded and people had been displaced. Lake Nakuru, which was previously enclosed by a national park, now extended beyond it. It had increased in size by 50%. Onywere, who has the air of a stern, experienced teacher, went to see the governor of Baringo County a few months later, but without much hope. He claims the governor showed little interest. Benjamin Cheboi, however, the then governor of Baringo County, disputes this, and says that he and Onywere never met.
Throughout the 2010s, the lakes rose slowly, and tens of thousands of people were forced to move from their homes. Then, at the start of 2020, after a particularly vicious period of rain in Kenya’s highlands, the lakes’ expansion accelerated. Lake Turkana swept past the Barrier volcanic complex – four overlapping volcanoes that had previously separated it from the much smaller Lake Logipi, which it now swallowed whole. Lake Baringo swallowed up the lesser-known Lake 94, and proceeded inland for about eight miles, while Lake Oloiden disappeared into Lake Naivasha’s clutches. Lake Baringo, which is freshwater, and Lake Bogoria, which is saltwater, moved towards each other, threatening to become a single body of water, which would devastate the wildlife in both lakes. At one point, the lakes came within four miles of each other.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/17/kenya-quiet-slide-underwater-great-rift-valley-lakes-east-africa-flooding
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Or that the changes will impact them. 
I thought of Lake Powell, too, when I read the story. And the recent story, too, of an old concrete plant being exposed as the water level drops.
