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  2. Oct 19, 2023 · A river is a ribbon-like body of water that flows downhill from the force of gravity. A river can be wide and deep, or shallow enough for a person to wade across. A flowing body of water that is smaller than a river is called a stream, creek, or brook. Some rivers flow year-round, while others flow only during certain seasons or when there has ...

  3. Apr 26, 2024 · River, (ultimately from Latin ripa, “bank”), any natural stream of water that flows in a channel with defined banks . Modern usage includes rivers that are multichanneled, intermittent, or ephemeral in flow and channels that are practically bankless.

    • Overview
    • River Trivia
    • Rivers Run Dry From Overuse

    The steady flow of the clean, fresh water of rivers is essential to human life and a whole host of aquatic species.

    Rivers and their tributaries are the veins of the planet, pumping freshwater to wetlands and lakes and out to sea. They flush nutrients through aquatic ecosystems, keeping thousands of species alive, and help sustain fisheries worth billions of dollars.

    Rivers are also the lifeblood of human civilizations. They supply water to cities, farms, and factories. Rivers carve shipping routes around the globe, and provide us with food, recreation, and energy.

    Hydroelectric plants built from bank to bank harness the power of water and convert it to electricity.

    But rivers are also often the endpoint for much of our industrial and urban pollution and runoff. When it rains, chemical fertilizer and animal waste peppering residential areas and agricultural lands is swept into local streams, rivers, and other bodies of water.

    The result: polluted drinking water sources and the decline of aquatic species, in addition to coastal dead zones caused by fertilizer and sewage overload.

    •An unsettling number of large rivers—including the Colorado, Rio Grande, Yellow, Indus, Ganges, Amu Darya, Murray, and Nile—are now so overtapped that they discharge little or no water to the sea for months at a time.

    •The world's biggest dam, the The Three Gorges dam on China's Yangtze River, is one of the largest power generators in the world, and holds almost 32 million acre-feet (39.3 cubic kilometers) of water. The hydropower-generating dam does have its drawbacks, though: It displaced an estimated 1.3 million people and flooded thousands of villages.

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    Beautiful tendrils fill the now dry Colorado River delta.

    Colorado River

    Beautiful tendrils fill the now dry Colorado River delta.

    Photograph by Peter McBride, Nat Geo Image Collection

    • Anatomy of a River. No two rivers are exactly alike. Yet all rivers have certain features in common and go through similar stages as they age. The beginning of a river is called its source or headwater s. The source may be a melting glacier, such as the Gangotri Glacier, the source of the Ganges River in Asia.
    • Rivers Through History. Rivers have always been important to people. In prehistoric times, people settled along the banks of rivers, where they found fish to eat and water for drinking, cooking, and bathing.
    • Rivers of Asia. Asia’s longest and most important river is the Yangtze, in China. It flows from the Dangla Mountains, between Tibet and China’s Qinghai province.
    • Rivers of South America. The strength of the Amazon River in South America dwarf s all other rivers on the planet. The amount of water flowing through the Amazon is greater than the amount carried by the Mississippi, the Yangtze, and the Nile combined.
  4. en.wikipedia.org › wiki › RiverRiver - Wikipedia

    A river is a natural flowing watercourse, usually a freshwater stream, flowing on the Earth's land surface or inside caves towards another waterbody at a lower elevation, such as an ocean, sea, bay, lake, wetland, or another river.

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  6. River - Water, Ecosystems, Navigation | Britannica. Home Geography & Travel Physical Geography of Water. Importance of rivers. Significance in early human settlements. The inner valleys of some great alluvial rivers contain the sites of ancestral permanent settlements, including pioneer cities.

  7. A river is a stream of water that flows through a channel on the surface of the ground. The passage where the river flows is called the river bed and the earth on each side is called a river bank. A river begins on high ground or in hills or mountains and flows down from the high ground to the lower ground, because of gravity. A river begins as ...

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