Victoria Falls Victoria Falls Victoria Falls (Lozi: "Mosi-oa-Tunya", "The Smoke that Thunders") is a waterfall in southern Africa on the Zambezi River at the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe. David Livingstone, the Scottish missionary and explorer, is believed to have been the first European to view Victoria Falls on 16 November 1855, from what is now known as Livingstone Island, one of two land masses in the middle of the river, immediately upstream from the falls near the Zambian shore. Livingstone named his discovery in honour of Queen Victoria of Britain, but the indigenous Lozi language name, "Mosi-oa-Tunya"—"The Smoke That Thunders"—continues in
Victoria Falls wetter climate conditions about 20,000 years BP, it eventually overflowed and began to drain to the east cutting the Batoka Gorge through the basalt as it went. The recent geological history of Victoria Falls can be seen in the overall form of the Batoka Gorge, with its six individual gorges and eight past positions of the falls. The east-west oriented gorges imply structural control with alignment along joints of shatter zones, or faults with of vertical displacement as is the case of the second and fifth gorges. Headward erosion along these structural lines of weakness would establish a new fall