• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Nigeria - Geography

Nigeria is located at the eastern terminus of the bulge of West Africa. As with many of the other nations of Africa, Nigeria's national boundaries result from its colonial history and cut across a number of cultural and physical boundaries. Nigeria has a total area of 923,768 square kilometers, it is about 60 percent the size of the state of Alaska, and has the greatest area of the nations along the coast of West Africa (although in Africa as a whole, it is only the fourteenth largest country by area).

The maximum north-south distance within the country is about 1,040 kilometers, whereas the maximum east-west distance is about 1,120 kilometers. Although it represents only about 3 percent of the surface area of Africa, Nigeria contains about 20 percent of sub-Saharan African population. In this and other respects, it is arguably the single most important country on the continent.

Much of Nigeria's surface consists of ancient crystalline rocks of the African Shield. Having been subject to weathering and erosion for long periods, the landscape of this area is characterized by extensive level plains interrupted by occasional granite mountains. These features are a major landscape type in Nigeria and in West Africa as a whole. Smaller areas of younger granites are also found, for example, on the Jos Plateau.

Sedimentary strata dating from various periods overlay the older rocks in many areas. The sedimentary areas typically consist of flat-topped ridges and dissected plateaus and a characteristic landscape of extensive plains with no major rocky outcrops. This landscape is generally found in the basins of the Niger and Benue rivers as well as the depressions of the Chad and Sokoto basins in the far northeast and northwest of the country, respectively. The most dramatic of the sedimentary landscapes are in southeastern Nigeria, where thick sedimentary beds from the Abakaliki Uplift to the Anambra Basin have been tilted and eroded. This process has resulted in a rugged scarp land topography with east-facing cliffs in the Udi Hills, north of Enugu, and in the area around Nanka and Agulu.

Although relatively little of the Nigerian landscape has been shaped by volcanic episodes, there are two main areas of volcanic rock. They are found on the Biu Plateau in the northeast, extending into some localized volcanic areas along the eastern border with Cameroon, and on the Jos Plateau in the northern center of the country.

The elevational pattern of most of Nigeria consists of a gradual rise from the coastal plains to the northern savanna regions, generally reaching an elevation of 600 to 700 meters. Higher altitudes, reaching more than 1,200 meters in elevation, are found only in isolated areas of the Jos Plateau and in parts of the eastern highlands along the Cameroon border. The coastal plain extends inland for about ten kilometers and rises to an elevation of forty to fifty meters above sea level at its northern boundary. The eastern and western sections of the coastal plain are separated by the Niger Delta, which extends over an area of about 10,000 square kilometers.

Much of this area is swampland, separated by numerous islands. The coastal plain region penetrates inland about seventy five kilometers in the west but extends farther in the east. This region is gently undulating, with elevation increasing northward and a mean elevation of about 150 meters above sea level. Much of the population of southern Nigeria is located in these eastern and western coastal plains and, as well, in some of the contiguous areas of the coast and the lower Niger Basin.

Separating the two segments of the coastal plain and extending to the northeast and northwest are the broad river basins of the Niger and Benue rivers. The upper reaches of these rivers form narrow valleys and contain falls and rapids. Most of the lower portions, however, are free from rapids and have extensive floodplains and braided stream channels. To the north of the Niger and Benue basins are the broad, stepped plateau and granite mountains that characterize much of northern Nigeria. Such mountains are also found in the southwest, in the region between the western coastal plains and the upper Niger Basin.

The western wedge between Abeokuta and Ibadan and the Niger Basin reaches elevations of 600 meters or more, whereas the extensive northern savanna region, stretching from Kontagora to Gombe and east to the border, includes extensive areas with elevations of more than 1,200 meters at its center. The mountainous zone along the middle part of the eastern border, the Cameroon Highlands, includes the country's highest point (2,042 meters). In the far northeast and northwest, elevation falls again to below 300 meters in the Chad Basin in the far northeast and the Sokoto Basin in the northwest.

Nigeria has two main relief regions: the high plateaux ranging between 300 and more than 900 meters above the sea level, and the Lowlands, which are generally less than 300 meters. The high plateaux include the north central plateau, the eastern and north eastern highlands and the western uplands.

The Lowlands comprise the Sokoto plains, the Niger-Benue trough, the Chad Basin, the interior coastal lowlands of western Nigeria, the lowlands and scarplands of south eastern Nigeria and Coastlands. Most of the country’s rivers take their sources from four main hydrological centers: the North Central plateau (Sokoto-Rima, Hadejia, Gongola, and Kaduna rivers etc.), the Western Uplands (Moshi, Awun, Ogun, Osun, Osse rivers etc.), the Eastern Highlands (Katsina-Ala, Donga rivers, etc.) and the Uri Plateau (Anambra, Imo and Cross rivers etc.).

These drainage and relief features of the country have impacts on water resources and land use potentials of the country particularly for agriculture. According to the 2008 State of the Environment Report (Federal Ministry of Environment, 2008), the total surface water resources potential for Nigeria is estimated at 267.3 billion m3 while the groundwater potential is put at 51.9 billion m3, giving a total of 319.2 billion m3. In addition, the number of relatively large dams completed or under construction is about 160 with a total active storage of 30.7 billion m3.

The distribution of vegetation dovetails that of rainfall and to some extent, the physiographic units in the country. The vegetation types can be broadly grouped into the tropical forests in the south and savanna in the north. The major physiographic elements affecting vegetation distributions are elevation, slope and aspect. Vegetation associated with altitude is described as montane vegetation. Soils are linked in several ways to vegetation and four main soil groups occur in a zonal pattern from the coast inland: hydromorphic and organic, ferralitic, ferruginous and the arid and semiarid soils.