I’m essentially asking how a river “starts”, since I generally know that rivers mostly ends flowing into the ocean.
If you could, please use the Yangtze river as an example.
In: Physics
The water itself comes from precipitation; rain, hail, sleet and snow, for example. This either flows directly into the river or forms ice at higher elevations which slowly melts and feeds into the river.
Precipitation starts from evaporation; typically water from the ocean evaporates into water vapour and floats into the sky (although water can also evaporate from rivers, lakes or anywhere else water is exposed to the air).
The Yangtze, however, is complicated. The “source” (or “start” of the river) is debatable. To make matters worse, it’s actually composed of several smaller rivers (or tributaries) that ultimately combine to form the Yangtze that we know. For the purposes of this answer, I’ll use the Geladangdong source. This is the end point of a glacier, which feeds meltwater into a tributary which ultimately becomes the Yangtze River.
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