where do rivers start? Can we trace rivers to a spot where it starts to pour out like a tap?
In: 8
If you search for maps of a “watershed” you will see that a river is something like a “reverse” tree branch. Water rolls downhill from melting snow in very small quantities, and then because of gravity just pools together on its way down and eventually comes a noticeable moving body of falling/rolling water. While you can designate one spot as the “beginning” of a river, it will be a small outflow from a mud puddle from melting snow on a hillside, that single spot isn’t really the source of the river. It’s just one of many sources of the start of a river. You might look at the topography of a flowing body of water and determine that some of the water continues on the same trajectory, while others flow into that trajectory.
So going upstream, we have one outflow to the ocean, one river, two or three tributaries, a dozen branches, dozens of streams, hundreds of little creeks flowing into those, and thousands of little runoffs in the mountains.
The river isn’t going from point A to point B itself as much as the river is “draining” the water out of a certain area of land.
Latest Answers