Despite increasing interest in studying lakes as complex systems, the fundamental principles governing lake formation and the observed power law size distributions remain elusive, hindering our ability to address water security and climate change. This talk introduces a novel approach by integrating the topographic wetness index (TWI) into percolation theory to simulate water connectivity on the land surface across 14 regions with diverse sizes, scales, and topographic features. Our findings reveal that discontinuous percolation transitions are common in Earth's topography, with critical TWI thresholds ranging from 0.617 to 0.724. This criticality extends beyond the critical point into a Griffiths phase. We observed that natural lake systems develop within this criticality regime, as evidenced by the emergence of the largest lake and the power law distribution of lake sizes. These results suggest that self-organized criticality is a key driver in the development of lake systems, likely driven by the system's quest for stability.