To my understanding, a river’s source is fueled by snow and rain, but is it enough to keep it running for that long? Afterall the source doesn’t get rain/snow 24/7 so wouldn’t bigger rivers drain the source in a matter of weeks instead of many hundreds of years?
In: Planetary Science
When it rains, the water gets absorbed into the soil. It can stay in the soil for up to hundreds of years, slowly traveling downhill until some of it emerges at the bottom of the valley to form a river. So there’s plenty of water in the soil to keep the river flowing until the next rain.
And when there is too much rain for too long to get absorbed into the soil, it stays on the surface and that is called a flood.
It seems mind blowing that there’s enough rain falling in the river catchment to keep the enormous river flowing constantly, but there has to be, the water has no other way of going uphill.
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