of small beaches and local authorities around the lake lack proper sewage treatment facilities allowing pollutants to find their way into the water. Large parts of these urban areas also discharge untreated (raw) sewage into the river, increasing its eutrophication that in turn is helping to increase the invasive water hyacinth. Increased logging and act of deforestation has led to environmental degradation around the region reducing the absorption of polluting chemicals and deteriorating the water quality. Environmental data As of 2016, an environmental data repository exists for Lake Victoria. The repository contains shoreline, bathymetry, pollution, temperature, wind vector, and other important data for both the lake and the wider Basin. History and exploration The first recorded information about Lake Victoria comes from Arab traders plying the inland routes in search of gold, ivory, other precious commodities, and slaves. The lake existed and was known to many Africans in the catchment area long before it was sighted by a European in 1858 when the British explorer John Hanning Speke reached its southern shore while on his journey with Richard Francis Burton to explore central Africa and locate the Great Lakes. Believing he had found the source of the Nile on seeing this "vast expanse of open water" for the first time, Speke named the lake after Queen Victoria. Burton, who had been recovering from illness at the time and resting further south on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, was outraged that Speke claimed to have proved his discovery to have been the true source of the Nile River, which Burton regarded as still unsettled. A very public quarrel ensued, which not only sparked a great deal of intense debate within the scientific community of the day, but also much interest by other explorers keen to either confirm or refute Speke's discovery. In the late 1860s, the famous Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone failed in his attempt to verify Speke's discovery, instead pushing too far west and entering the River Congo system instead. Ultimately, the Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley, on an expedition funded by the New York Herald newspaper, confirmed the truth of Speke's discovery, circumnavigating the lake and reporting the great outflow at Ripon Falls on the lake's northern shore. Nalubaale Dam The only outflow for Lake Victoria is at Jinja, Uganda, where it forms the Victoria Nile. The water for at least 12,000 years has drained across a