National Geographic published that the tallest waterfall in the world is the Angel Falls located in Venezuela. This waterfall is 979 meters tall or 3,212 feet. The Angel Falls comes down over the edge of Auyán-Tepuí, which stands for Devil's Mountain, elevated area of land with a flat top and sheer cliff sides located in the Bolivar State of Venezuela – Canaima National Park.

This fall is named after an American pilot and explorer, Jimmy Angel, who crashed his airplane on Auyán-Tepuí in 1937. Angel Falls is powered by the Churún River, which pours out over the edge of the mountain, barely interacting with the cliff face. The waterfall is so high that the stream of water turns into a cloud of fogginess, then joins back together near the bottom of the cliff and continues on as a fast running stream.

Total height of Angel Falls, which is almost one kilometer (a half-mile), includes the free-fall plunge and extension of steep rapids at its base. Even if we discount these rapids, the Angel Falls long and uninterrupted drop of 807m (2,649 feet) is still breaking a record and is around 15 times taller than Niagara Falls in North America, according to the World Waterfall Database, which is a website created by waterfall enthusiasts.

However, Angel Falls is the highest waterfall on land. If we consider all waterfalls, the largest waterfall is actually underwater, between Iceland and Greenland. This underwater waterfall is called “The Denmark Strait cataract”, and its more than three times higher than Angel Falls, water is dropping over 3,505m (11,500 feet).

The Denmark Strait underwater waterfall is formed by the difference in temperature between the water flows on each side. When lighter and warmer water is coming from the west, meets the colder, denser water from the east, the cold water is floating down and underneath the warm water.

In terms of volume, The Denmark Strait is the top waterfall in the world, carrying 50 million cubic meters of water (175 million cubic feet). On the land, finding the waterfall with the largest volume is a little bit trickier because there is no established standard for determining what counts as a waterfall.

Some waterfalls have a single, sheer drop, other waterfalls have a smoother cascade over rapids; and still other waterfalls include a combination of those two, just like Angel Falls.

Waterfall with the largest volume on land is Inga Falls, an area of rapids on the Congo River. Each second, more than 46 million liters (11 million gallons) of water flow through Inga Falls. But, because this waterfall doesn’t have significant vertical drop, Inga Falls counts only as a waterfall with the largest volume of water.

The waterfall with the greatest volume and the largest vertical drop is the 14 meters tall (45 foot) Khone Falls, on the border between Cambodia and Laos. Spilling more than 9.5 million liters (2.5 million gallons) of water from Mekong River every second, flow of Khone Falls is nearly two times more the volume of Niagara Falls.