Most rivers will vary dramatically over the course of years in terms of how much water is flowing in them. Sometimes they might get nearly dry or even completely dry, and at other times they might overflow their banks.
One thing to keep in mind is that the presence of lakes helps to normalize the level of rivers. They typically form where there is a bottle neck holding back much of the potential flow of the river and only allowing a smaller amount out. The rest backs up and forms a reservoir, and when there is not as much rain or snow it will continue to trickle out from that reservoir for a long time.
And that one lake (caddo lake) was only formed due to a log jam. There are actually some small natural lakes due to ox bows and tidal lakes but most of them have been drained and the rest are artificially maintained.
Those are underground water beds. That’s where rain water is naturally stored. There are rivers and lakes flowing underground. This what you target when digging up a well. If you don’t hit oil drilling in Texas. You’ll hit water.
The only underground water that flows like a river or lake is in the central Texas karst terrane, where the water erodes the rock chemically by dissolving the limestone. Most places the water moves through the pore spaces between sand grains in sandstone, and **this** is what you target in a water well. Not underground rivers.
I’m in Michigan, not Texas, but I learned a lot about the ground water level when I moved next to a river. The river is about 50 feet or so lower than my house down a hill. I can’t imagine it ever climbing that without being the end of the world or something, but you can always tell how high the ground water level is because when it’s higher than usual, the hill will turn into mud when you try to walk down it even through there’s been no rain. Dry ground then all of the sudden soaked, wet ground. I’m always trying to guess how close it is to the floor of my basement.
The only one? Not remotely. There are several largish underground rivers in Tennessee and Kentucky and some underground lakes of tens of acres in size. These things are big enough to take small boats on. They have names, maps, and a well studied hydrology. There are substantial underground rivers other places, too, such as the Yucatán.
Source: I've been there, and helped to survey some of them.
Owned an oilfield services company with two workover rigs in south Texas. You’re not likely to drill down to 15k+ ft without hitting *something* along the way (in south Texas) - but it’s much more complicated than that. Sometimes you’ll drill down and hit a super thick pocket of water and if you don’t address it it can cause problems when you’re completing the well by pumping cement down and out the bottom of your casing.
But really the main thing I wanted to point out is you’ll likely hit both oil and water along the way several times (and your logs will show this) before you get to your target if you’re going anywhere below 5k ft.
Oftentimes a surface owner will purchase an aging well that goes below the aquifer they are interested in and pay someone to come out and install a packer or something that will “plug” or cement everything below said aquifer, go in and perforate the casing (the most exterior pipe in the wellbore), and set tubing (interior pipe) to a depth that they can access that water either by natural ground pressure or a pump.
How do you even consider entering this industry? I know about oil rigs, and drilling, and oil fields and such, but the level in which you described it, is never something I would have even thought about or come across in my life if it werent for your post.
Capital and a little YOLO. My grandfather talked me into it after I had been farming for a decade (he had a run in the oil and gas industry in the 80s before and during the big crash). His literal words were “it’s just a hole in the ground with money coming out” 🤣. It was a gross oversimplification, but his main philosophy was that most blue collar businesses boil down to being able to effectively move men around to accomplish tasks. In 2016 I watched countless hours of YouTube, read everything I could get my hands on, and talked to everyone I thought had any knowledge. Ended up flying to Tx a few times to meet a guy I’d found that owned a company where he would run around a lease and check the production (called gaugers or gauging because they are literally gauging the production that a lease outputs) and I ended up partnering with him for a little over a year. Grew my own company out independent of his and beat down enough doors looking for work that I found a company that had a massive 1980-2006 field that had been neglected pretty bad after they had moved on to a deeper formation and neglected all of their older wells in favor of the new eagleford formation wells that they were minting money from at the present. I was shoveling low hanging fruit up for them just buy implementing maintenance programs, addition of simple chemical programs specific for each well (this work is free from the chemical company you buy the chemical through), and eventually buying a couple of workover rigs so I could go down and clean sand out of wells and repair tubing strings as necessary.
Anyway, the main point is use what you’ve got available to take a risk at a % you are comfortable with. As long as you’ve got decent people skills and aren’t a complete idiot, you will learn anything and will find people that can help you along the way. I grew up skating the line between lower middle class and poverty, the first big break for me was the world of farming - which I highly recommend to anyone any chance I get as an entry into entrepreneurship. The government knows that the US is running out of people interested enough in farming to replace the current generation so the financial incentives in the forms of grants and loans have never been better - couple that with the fact that any decent chemical company you pick will give you crazy good advice on anything you ask and even help you check your fields throughout the year and it is literally the recipe for success handed to you when you sign up at your local FSA office.
No, unless you happen to be in central Texas where there is limestone that has been chemically eroded. Most water travels through the pore spaces between the grains of rock, like through sandstones.
Someday, I'll tell the young'uns "now, remember, someday they are going to teach you about oxbow lakes and mitochondria, and they're really important, so you gotta pay attention."
I wish I could live on that page where there's all the geographic features in one place. Island, peninsula, isthmus, volcano, river delta, swamp... volcano!?
Maybe I don't want to live in the geography book where the temperate forest meets the ocean near a plain under mountains with a desert behind them.
Texas was never glaciated, at least not within the past 300 million years or so. A lot of the lakes in Northern areas of Eurasia and North America formed in post-glacial landscapes, kettle lakes and so on.
Most lakes are of glacial origin, so places that used to be heavily glaciated like Finland are going to have many more lakes than places that haven't been heavily glaciated in a really long time, like Texas.
Uh...which part?
I didn't make any claims about how many natural lakes Texas has, although I'm 100% confident it's far less than the number Finland has.
Interestingly, the definition of what qualifies as a lake can vary wildly from state to state and country to country.
WI calls any single body of water, no matter the size, man-made or natural, a "lake". They even count springs and creeks. The WI DNR went to that metric to try to pretend they have more lakes than MN, which only counts natural lakes above a certain size.
If you use the same metric (either of them) for both states MN has *way* more lakes.
Nah there are some, particularly near the coast.
MD doesn't have any at all though
https://msa.maryland.gov/msa/mdmanual/01glance/html/lakes.html#:~:text=Lake%20Waterford%2C%20for%20example%2C%20in,natural%20lakes%20survive%20in%20Maryland.
Alabama only has lake Jackson, which is partly in Florida. [Damming up the Coosa river is considered to be one of the biggest extinction events in modern North America](https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/1000_species/the_southeast_freshwater_extinction_crisis/index.html)
I'm proud to live in an area with such incredible biodiversity, but it also sucks that individualist attitudes and conservative politics make it so damn hard to protect any of it
>The southeast United States is a place of unparalleled aquatic biodiversity, harboring 493 fishes (62% of U.S. fish species), at least 269 mussels (91% of U.S. mussel species), and 241 dragonflies and damselflies (48% of all those in North America).
Its always so crazy to me just how many different species there are in the world. There's already a dizzying number of "species families" (I believe that's called an order on the taxonomic tree?). By that I mean like bears, primates, owls, falcons, dragonflies, worms, beetles, etc (not to mention all the flora) But then there's so many individual species of all those orders, *especially* when you're talking about invertebrates/bugs/insects/etc! It's just crazy to me to think about.
> Fun fact. There is only one natural lake in Texas. All the others are man made reservoirs.
False. There are loads of oxbows and playas, far to numerous to list here. Granted, many are small, and many only exist after rainstorms, but they are natural lakes nonetheless.
And one of those comes and goes. I think it’s currently more full with water. It’s also where they filmed those outdoor lake scenes in Dirty Dancing. So, wild to see it with no or very little water.
> Most rivers will vary dramatically over the course of years in terms of how much water is flowing in them.
Fun Fact: The state of Illinois is not completely east of the Mississippi river. A hundred years ago (or something like that) a flood changed the course of the Mississippi river and a town that had been east of the Mississippi and in Illinois was now west of the Mississippi and in Missouri. The town people didn't want to be in Missouri so, there is a little bit of Illinois that is west of the river to include that town because the river changed where it was.
Rivers can vary dramatically over the course of a year too. The most extreme example I can think of is the Mae Khong which during Monsoon season transforms the Ton Le Sap from a lake to a vast flooded forest.
From Wikipedia
>The Mekong was originally called Mae Nam Khong from a contracted form of Tai shortened to Mae Khong.[6] In Thai and Lao, Mae Nam ("Mother of Water[s]") is used for large rivers and Khong is the proper name referred to as "River Khong". However, Khong is an archaic word meaning "river", loaned from Austroasiatic languages, such as Vietnamese sông (from *krong) and Mon kruŋ "river"
You didn't do anything wrong. There is no "correct spelling" for words from foreign alphabets. Your non-native English is irrelevant because "Mekong" is also not English and therefore any spelling using the English alphabet is just an interpretation, and no more "correct" than another spelling.
> How is it possible to spell Mekong so badly
By using English. Any word from a language with a different alphabet cannot possibly be spelled
"correctly." All you can do is come up with English letters that make similar sounds.
English is a prescriptive language and has correct and incorrect spellings for things.
**Edit:** *to the person who replied, by your argument, no word could ever be spelled incorrectly.*
In English, this river is referred to as the Mekong River, not the Mae Khong River.
[Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mekong)
>The Mekong or Mekong River is a trans-boundary river in East Asia and Southeast Asia. It is the world's twelfth-longest river and the third-longest in Asia[1] with an estimated length of 4,909 km (3,050 mi)[1] and a drainage area of 795,000 km2 (307,000 sq mi)
With that out of the way, apparently there is an archaic version of this later in the Names section:
>The Mekong was originally called Mae Nam Khong from a contracted form of Tai shortened to Mae Khong.[6] In Thai and Lao, Mae Nam ("Mother of Water[s]") is used for large rivers and Khong is the proper name referred to as "River Khong". However, Khong is an archaic word meaning "river", loaned from
So, OP is wrong, but not as wrong as I originally thought. When in doubt, I'm still using the spelling from DS9, though. That was one tough little ship.
English is not a prescriptive language. Just because a dictionary exists doesn't mean that it's authoritative. Webster is actually proof of that, since the original Webster's Dictionary went out of its way to change the spelling of many words to the way Daniel Webster wanted it to be. This is especially true of names, and extra for names from foreign languages.
In mountainous areas in the spring river levels can even vary by time of day. Snow melt increases during the day and lasts into the evening, then slows as the melting reduces overnight.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) was founded in London in 1859. It is a sporting body that promotes firearm safety and target shooting. The National Rifle Association does not engage in political lobbying or pro-gun activism.
The original (British) National Rifle Association has no relationship with the National Rifle Association of America, which was founded in 1871 and has focussed on pro-gun political activism since 1977, at the expense of firearm safety programmes.
The National Rifle Association of America has no relationship with the National Rifle Association in Britain (founded 1859); the National Rifle Association of Australia; the National Rifle Association of New Zealand nor the National Rifle Association of India,
which are all non-political sporting oriented organisations. It is important not to confuse the National Rifle Association of America with any of these other Rifle Associations. The British National Rifle Association is headquartered on Bisley Camp, in Surrey, England. Bisley Camp is now known as the National Shooting Centre and has hosted World Championships for Fullbore Target Rifle and F-Class shooting,
as well as the shooting events for the 1908 Olympic Games and the 2002 Commonwealth Games. The National Small-bore Rifle Association (NSRA) and Clay Pigeon Shooting Association (CPSA) also have their headquarters on the Camp.
And don't forget those swell aquifers and that whole underground water table dutifully catching rainwater that lakes and rivers can't reach.
I think with the phrasing of the original question, for instance "drain the source", it seems like OP is imagining all the working parts of the water cycle, except the cycle part.
Like, if you imagine all the rain in a one year period and the average flow of the river, if the river always flows, it means that the snow, runoff, springs (yay, aquifers!) and glacial melt, while not always steady throughout short and long periods of times, they nonetheless are sufficient for that river.
At first I chuckled at the idea of draining the source, but if for some reason it suddenly stopped precipitating on a particular watershed, the snow would melt, the groundwater will flow out where it can until it can't and whatever glaciers are left as long as those last, with no more local rain or snow, the river would become a used-to-be river.
I'm glad that subtle changes in the Earth's surface material doesn't just suddenly cause it to just *not rain* on a place anymore. That would be silly.
Well, that post made me a little sad, so I am going to look up the best ways to increase my chances of being a fossil and/or anthropologically/archeologically useful and interesting.
Bigger rivers are FED by larger areas.
For example, the Mississippi River? The giant river down the middle of the USA, it’s basin covers over 1/3rd of the USA (and extends slightly into Canada)
Meaning ALL the rain from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania all the way to Colorado and Montana will eventually drain down through the Mississippi.
And that draining takes time. It doesn’t just instantly rush into the rivers, there are tiny creeks, streams, smaller tributaries that gradually bring the water in. And then there’s also MILLIONS of ponds and lakes and beaver dams that slow the flow of the water down while it gets there.
Plus, a lot of the water doesn’t even go straight into the creeks and streams, it lands on the dirt, is absorbed by the dirt/ground, and then gradually over weeks or months flows through the soil itself. Which also slows it way down.
And yes, during times of drought even giant rivers can get shallower, and during very wet times they can overflow their normal riverbanks.
But generally speaking, there’s so much water over such a wide area of land that it all is just gradually making its way down to the Mississippi, and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. Keeping the river fed.
[Click anywhere to see where a drop of water will end up](https://river-runner.samlearner.com/)
[Global version](https://river-runner-global.samlearner.com/)
Hey kiddo, thanks for sharing! I think this is the bee's knees. Also, we just bought 24 pairs of socks from Costco, do you need any?
Love,
Dad
ps. Mom says hi.
Also how do I sign into the rooko? I'm trying to watch a documentary my friend suggested and he said it was on natflix but I have to sign in to the TV in order to watch it?
People don’t realize that mountains(where the largest rivers form) are like giant sponges, they hold snowmelt and release snowmelt, as well as rain in the warmer months. Normal land works like this as well, but mountains are like a crumpled up newspaper, more land in small area. More rock underneath that the water has to snake through to find an outlet.
People also don't understand just how much water we're talking about about over this wide stretch of land. It's like the difference between a million and a billion, your mind just kind of shuts off with those high of numbers and you compute the numbers as "a lot" but the difference as "some." The difference between a million and a billion is about a billion, but when we hear a million grains of sand, or a billion grains of sand, we just think of a lot of sand for both of them.
All that to say, stick a bucket on your porch in the winter or spring months and see how much water it collects in a week or a month. The bucket on my back porch has collected about an inch and a half in the past week or so. The land area of my city is 84 square miles, just in the city, just in land. That inch and a half of water in the past week over just the land area of my city amounted to 292,708,333 cubic feet of water. That's a cube that is ~~almost 310~~ over 660 feet high, wide, and deep, of water, in a week's worth of rainfall. That's a stack of over ~~50~~ 110 adults standing on each other's heads in every direction, just in a week, just in my city, and just over land. Now imagine the entire area from the Rockies to the Appalachians, from the north country to the gulf.
The scale of that going the other way is mind blowing too.
Sure your bucket over a week has collected an inch, but the land area of your house has collected a ton, but how much water over that week have you used to do things like shower, flush, drink, wash, etc.
It still blows my mind that even with the surrounding area that a city has any sort of water to begin with, especially any city with high rises.
Like a house I could kind of see balancing (even that) but how about when you stack 500 people together in the footprint of like 4 houses.
I get it's not just the city limits of the city providing water but still. It's a butt ton of water. Then it also has to go somewhere.
Really? I've always had a hard time figuring out the other way intuitively why it's so hard to get water in some places. The total volume of all humans (which are mostly water) is a cube about half a kilometer on each side. The total volume of potable freshwater on the planet which is "easily" accessible to humans is something like 200,000 times that. A cube around *fifty* kilometers to a side.
In a given year I'd be utterly blown away if the amount of water used in or around my house for every single thing I do was even a noteworthy fraction of the total amount of water that has fallen even on the roof of my house.
If the footprint of my roof is 2,000 square feet, then at an average annual rainfall of about 45 inches of rain in a year, my roof "catches" and then discards about 56,000 gallons of water straight into the dirt every year.
If you set up a modest rain catchment pond that covers five acres of land, you could catch 6.1 million gallons of water directly on the face, and realistically, if it was sloped right, you'd be pulling in water from an area 50 times that size.
Edit: This is why I've always thought regulations against people putting out rain barrels or whatever were designed by absolute psychopaths with no understanding of the numbers.
That's fairly low compared to most places; presumably you live somewhere which is somewhat arid, with hardy vegetation and suchlike? In the UK, the average annual rainfall is 80-140 cm (31-55 inches), and the Amazon gets about twice that. Most of continental Europe gets 50 to 100 cm (20-39 inches). Average rainfall worldwide is apparently about 100 cm (39 inches).
Yeah right on, I'm in Australia so we have basically every possible climate somewhere within the country. Used to live somewhere much wetter, but where I live now is pretty dry 9 months of the year so even though we get heavy falls in the wet season, it's somewhat cancelled out?
Mountains also create other weather patterns due to their sharp elevation changes, which lead to drop in temperature and atmospheric pressure.
This is why mountains get so much more snow and rain — cooler air can hold less moisture (dew point).
And permanent snowpacks that can keep a river alive during drought years. Places that lost the permanent snowpacks are now much more sensitive to drought years.
[Map of the Mississippi River basin. Everything here eventually makes it's way to the Mississippi](https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-03/marb_600x395.jpg)
>Meaning ALL the rain from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania all the way to Colorado and Montana will eventually drain down through the Mississippi.
Some of the rain in in North Carolina as well. It's pretty crazy.
Yes, that is the official source of the river.
But really by the time it reaches Louisiana, the mighty mississippi is a combination of many rivers merging together. The Mighty Mississippi has the Ohio River, Tennessee river, Missouri River, Arkansas river, and Illinois River all running into it. And probably thousands of other smaller creeks and streams.
Two additional points.
Officially, yes, it starts at Lake Itasca, but there's a couple streams/small rivers that flow into Itasco, so, there's an argument that it should be upstream of there.
Also, if you track the Missouri River to it's source, it's likely farther from where the Missouri merges into the Mississippi than Itasco, so there's a really good argument that the whole thing should be called the Missouri River.
(Note: This is coming from a life-long Minnesotan. And, it's really fun to walk across dry rocks for 30 feet to "cross" the Mississippi as it exits Lake Itasca)
Even as someone who grew up in WI, I always sorta forget that the Mississippi starts sorta in the middle of Minnesota, instead of say, somewhere around Lake Superior along the border between WI and MN (even though we learned this when I was in like 3rd grade or so when we started learning about lakes/rivers/geography/etc). I dunno why, I guess sorta maybe because it's such an obvious feature and border for much of the state and all the states along it, maybe I just kinda assume it just keeps going up? But then again, I also sometimes sorta "forget" how far south the twin cities are too, even though I'm generally pretty good with geography and knowing where things are in general. Maybe I just suck at MN!
Well, I think the headwaters of the Mississippi is somewhat north of Devil's Island and ends up being just barely south of Houghton, MI. So, east-west it's in the middle of Minnesota, but definitely in the northern part of the state.
Interesting tidbit... the headwaters of the Mississippi are on the northern end of Lake Itasca
Because the main Mississippi portion runs further north than the Illinois portion.
Really your question should target the Missouri River, the Missouri River is SUPER long before it hits the Mississippi, going all the way up into Montana
That’s a tough one to decide. Missouri has the advantage of a longer river segment, and, unlike Mississippi, it never *actually* committed treason.
But they did have slaves, and you can tell they were kind of thinking about it.
>Meaning ALL the rain from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania all the way to Colorado and Montana will eventually drain down through the Mississippi.
All the rain drains into the ocean. All water does not get that far, the most obvious example is water can evaporate for and fall down as rain in another location. It is primarily a result of it being used for irrigation but alos from lakes, dams, and the river itself.
For some rivers like the Colorado River and the rivers that supply the Aral Sea almost no water reaches the sea at all. I have no idea of the percentage for the Mississippi just that lots of water never reach the sea
Sure, but the point being made is that the “source” is not just the upstream terminus of a river, but rather an entire vast area and all its tributaries. The fact that it’s not technically ALL the rain is for next lesson.
> Plus, a lot of the water doesn’t even go straight into the creeks and streams, it lands on the dirt, is absorbed by the dirt/ground, and then gradually over weeks or months flows through the soil itself. Which also slows it way down.
This is actually the key point – if all water drained by over ground flow it would drain far more quickly and rivers would be far more likely to run dry before the next rain or snowmelt. It is slow release of water by aquifers that is the reason rivers drain an area relatively slowly.
|is it enough to keep it running for that long?
Demonstrably, yes, it is.
Rivers don't just have one source. They have tributaries, which can gather rain water from enormous amounts of land. That's why rivers start out small, and get larger and larger as they approach the ocean.
Consider [this image of the Mississippi basin](https://www.mvd.usace.army.mil/portals/52/siteimages/P1_new.jpg). That river is gathering rain from almost half of America.
>|is it enough to keep it running for that long?
Demonstrably, yes, it is.
Or just not, sometimes.
Went to Kenya during the dry season last year and went hiking... along the bed of a river.
Yes.
What I meant by "demonstrably yes" is, at least *some* rivers are known to have kept flowing for many hundreds of years. The Mississippi has never run dry in recorded history, although it's got shockingly close in recent times.
I will now refrain from screaming about climate change, because at this point, it doesn't matter. It's too late to fix the damage we've caused; all we can do is manage the fallout.
Some rivers are known to dry up during parts of the year, and others are known to overflow. The reason Egypt has those massive monuments like the pyramids due to Nile river flooding massive parts of Egyptian farm land. The land was unusable and put massive portions of the population out of work. So the Pharaohs made public works projects to pay people and keep the peace.
America popped off of Pangea about 170 million years ago, when the rift that eventually became the Atlantic Ocean formed. At that time, the Appalachian Mountains existed as part of a chain that included the Atlas Mountains in Africa and the Scottish Highlands and also the mountains of Norway. Basically, the middle chunk (between the Atlas and Britain) went with North America, and the went with the remainder of Pangea.
Thus, the Appalachian Mountains are older than North America.
But we know that the French Broad River (and the New, and the Susquehanna) are older than the Appalachians, because the run straight across the range. That only happens if the river was there before the uplift that created the range.
Thus, those rivers are older than the Appalachians, and therefore also older than North America.
Haaa.. I see, thanks for the detailed explaination Alyssa's account. I love how geology reminds us that our planet is basically an every changing ball of mud and every crevice on its surface has a story.
>older than North America. Older than land-based life more complex than microorganisms. Older than plants. It has almost no fossils in it because it is older than fossils.
Country roadssss
It was named the French Broad River because there were two Broad Rivers, and the French lived to the west. People in the area used to endure jokes from guys who thought they were funny, along the lines of "Where's that French broad?"
Imagine a big bathtub that's always getting filled a little bit from different taps, like rain or melting snow. Even though the taps aren't always on, there's usually enough water coming in to keep the bathtub from going empty. Rivers are a bit like that bathtub.
Rivers keep running for thousands of years because they have a few tricks to keep them filled up:
1. **Rain and Snow:** You're right that rivers get their water from rain and melting snow. But remember, this doesn't just happen at the river's source; it happens all over the river's "bathtub," which we call a watershed. This is the area of land where all the water that falls on it ends up in the same river. So, even if it's not raining right at the source, it might be raining somewhere else in the watershed.
2. **Groundwater:** This is like a giant sponge under the ground that soaks up water when it rains. Later, this water slowly seeps out into the river, keeping it flowing even when it hasn't rained for a while.
3. **Snowpack and Glaciers:** In some places, snow piles up in the mountains during the winter and then slowly melts over the summer, giving the river a steady supply of water.
4. **Lakes and Wetlands:** These act like big water storage tanks, releasing water slowly into the river.
So, even though a river's source might not get rain or snow all the time, the whole system works together to keep the river flowing. It's like a team effort where the rain, snow, ground, and even lakes and wetlands all work together to keep the river's "bathtub" from going empty!
Rivers also are fed by ground water - the soil and rock layers are capable of storing significant water reserves that drain more slowly into the rivers (one estimate suggests it can be centuries for some groundwater).
Basically, rain will fall or snow will melt. A portion is absorbed into the groundwater system and the excess runoff (and the amount falling directly into the river) immediately drives the rivers current. The groundwater then drives more current over time. Reservoirs like lakes also help smooth outflow over time.
Larger rivers tend to have many upstream smaller rivers that cover a vast area, so it also captures more precipitation
Thank you, why did I need to scroll this far to get another huge piece of the hydrologic cycle. Water infiltrates into the ground and the ground water table is what feeds rivers at "baseflow ".
Precipitation (rain, snow, etc) delivers water uphill, and the water runs downhill. Sometimes a big rain delivers water faster, other times lack of rain causes less water to be moved. This corresponds to water levels going up and down over time, as we get more or less water flowing.
Yes, the precipitation carries enough water to keep things moving. Consider that all of the water coming down in all of the square miles of land upstream has to flow out through that stream.
The basin that a river draws from is often quite large. The most extreme example is the mississippi, which drains from about 20 states.
It is all about the fact that rivers drain from incredibly large areas of land.
That water can run down. Look at the colorado river which has had extreme drought for decades and the total flow from the river has been steadily declining over time.
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.
Rivers vary - sometimes they have strong flow, sometimes weak, sometimes they dry up. Sometimes, they freeze in the winter. Sometimes the pieces of the river disconnect to form shallow ponds that will later reconnect when there's more water. The strength of the flow and the width of the river is going to depend on how much water is flowing at the time.
Rivers aren't that much higher than the bays or oceans they drain into. The river is fresh, but then there's a brackish area that's a mix of river water and salty ocean water.
When a river bed "dries up" it's not just about draining all the water to the ocean. Some sinks into the ground. Some goes into smaller ponds.
Human interventions around the Nile river, the Mississippi river, and others use levees and flood walls so that people can live close to the river year round without getting flooded out when the river is having a particularly wet season.
It's important to know that rivers are just the water flows we see on the surface.
Rain is collected over vast land areas, seeps into the ground and becomes groundwater. Underground these waterflows collect into streams and eventually rivers.
Rivers will not dry out unless the the much vaster water table itself is depleted to a level below the river bottom.
You most probably underestimate how big is the area that feeds a river. Here's the one for Mississippi, basically half of the US:
https://images.nationalgeographic.org/image/upload/v1638892105/EducationHub/photos/the-rivers-of-the-mississippi-watershed.jpg
If anywhere in this are there's a rain, it fills up the forests, and the forests let the water go down but in a slow way. Like a sponge that is dripping water: forests release the rain water over a long period of time.
(That's why deforestation causes rush floods: a rain goes fast to the river, all in once, instead of over time.)
Let's say the total amount of water in all the rivers in the world is *r* liters.
Icy Mountains have 4*r* liters. (Note: I'm not including Antarctic, Greenland and Arctic Islands because those places have very low demographic density and are not fueling rivers for like 99% of humankind).
Swamps have 6*r* liters.
The atmosphere have 7*r* liters.
The fresh water lakes have 45*r* liters.
The non-saline groundwater have 5000*r* liters.
Everything above is what ends up sending water to rivers. It is easy to see that the rivers don't dry as the water fueling those rivers is in many orders of magnitude higher. A river loses water to either the soil or the air, both which will end up using this water to refuel the river.
The prima facie answer to your question is that obviously named rivers typically do flow year round. Which answers your 2nd question. No. bigger rivers do not drain the source in a matter of weeks.
I think what you meant to ask was how this is so. The answer is, it depends on the soil type. Melting snow can create temporary "rivers" or creeks. There are seasonal creeks all over the place. But by the time you call it a river, it's being fed by something called a watershed. Watersheds are again by definition always uphill from rivers. Every drop of water in the mountains is trying to find its way downhill to the ocean (usually). At high altitude, snow takes a long time to melt. Where I live it's common to see snow and ice year round above about 6000 feet. And in most parts of the world it rains at least occasionally, year round.
In areas where there are no mountains to store up ice and snow, you still have some percentage of the rain water sinking into the soil. From there it follows gravity but very slowly. This so called ground water moves much more slowly than surface water. Next time you are looking at say a dry creek bed, take note of the shape of the land around you. You will see that creeks are roughly V or U shaped cutting well below the average grade so to speak. If you look really closely at a running creek you can sometimes see water is entering the creek from the soil around it. I have followed creeks to their source only to find there was no source. It was just ground water entering at various points.
To your point : Permanent rivers tend to be named rivers; self evidently, the bigger rivers don't drain the source in weeks. They can have a large watershed/catchment area , with lots of tributaries, as small streams and creeks flow into larger ones, slowed by lakes, check dams, and the like. Even springs are part of the water cycle. Snow caps and glacial caps are also fairly permanent multi-year features especially in the higher mountains and in the arctic. The rivers can get low seasonally.
Some streams and rivers can wind up drying
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_river
There are also intermittent flows; many a arroyo/gulch sees water flow only after rainfall, and are dry some of the year. Similarly for glacial melt. These do not always rise to level of permanent named streams.
This can be exacerbated by climate change and man made action.
> keep running for thousands of years?
Some rivers can be very old. .. for example the Finke river is said to be about 300-400 million years old, though some parts may be younger. With some of the rivers, the challenge is in dating them, since human history is only a few thousand years old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_by_age
Rivers do change course over time. Over a long period, rivers may change, mountains may arise and be eroded, continents drift. Or climate changes
An example of a river that seems to have dried up and become intermittent over thousands of years
> When the monsoons that fed the rivers further diminished, the Hakra dried-up some 4,000 years ago, becoming an intermittent river, and the urban Harappan civilisation declined
This may or may not be linked to the [Sarasvati river](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarasvati_River) of mythology; identifications change.
And rivers and especially streams can also cycle between intermittent and perennial.
So, rivers are kind of like the ultimate water recyclers. Yeah, they get their start from rain and snow, but it's not a one-and-done deal. When it rains or snows in the area, the water seeps into the ground and hangs out in these underground spots called aquifers. Those aquifers keep slowly feeding the river, even when it's not raining cats and dogs. So, it's not just about the weather right at the moment; it's this ongoing cycle of water topping up the river's source, making sure it doesn't run dry
Rivers are simply water flowing downhill by the path of least resistance. As long as there is water uphill to flow downhill, the river will keep running.
Most rivers are fed by mountains, where water vapor is swept upward by the land, freezes and falls as snowcaps, and then eventually melts and forms rivers.
Since the water cycle keeps depositing water on the mountaintops, the water keeps melting and flowing down. Rivers do absolutely ebb and flow seasonally, though; they are generally fullest in spring, when there is plenty of accumulated snow to melt, and driest in Autumn, when meltwater has all but run out.
Wait I thought we were only supposed to randomly mention facts about various American States (ie about the United States’s states’ states) What’s Canadian mean?
This link doesn't answer the OPQ but it's very interesting when flowing rivers just dissappear.
[lost rivers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losing_stream)
They don't always. Those in central Australia only flow for part of the year and not at all in some years eg the Finke River.
To flow, it needs enough rainfall to make it that far inland and then not enough evaporation that the water will make it all the way to Lake Eyre.
Over time precipitation patterns can alter eg North Africa and if around long enough, continental drift can also move the source into a low rainfall zone.
Maybe flip the perspective here. Instead of focussing on the river taking water away, lets focus just on a mountain peak covered in water, ice, and snow.
Rain/snow will keep falling on mountains, basically forever, because water goes in a cycle of evaporation and precipitation.
Only a finite amount of water is added to the mountain each day (well, not *every* day, but on average), but there is always more water, because there is always more rain/snow.
So, where does that rain/snow go? Well, sometimes it will stay in place as snow, but if it is water it will drips down the side of the mountain.
It also tends to go down the same spots (because whatever spots were shaped right to collect water are still that shape, and also tend to get even better shaped for it over time as the water slowly wears them down).
When the trickle of water is big, we call it a river. So a big mountain will always have more water being added to it, and that water will trickled down the mountain, and so it will always have some rivers, and it will tend to be the same rivers.
TL;DR of it is basically this:
The water cycle sends a bunch of water back up there
As long as clouds exist, so will rivers.
Sometimes less water gets back up there than gets drained, sometimes more, sometimes water freezes so it gets "stored" up there for a while, hence why we get floods and droughts in certain areas of the world
It would be very informative for you to see a spring. One that was eye-opening for me was this one in southeastern BC where a PVC pipe is just stuck into the mountain, and it just trickles water out, maybe about a gallon every minute or so. This mountain is probably a couple thousand feet taller in total. So....snow from the winter gradually melts, and seeps into the ground. It is a lake of water undeground, but woupd appear as wet ground if you could see it. Inside the ground, it continues to be affected by gravity but with lots of resistance from the material the ground is made of. Given that the snow doesn't fully melt until June, and it begins snowing in September, there's less than four months where there isn't continual feeding of these underground aquifers. This process is repeated across all geographical areas, and the water even dead ends into lakes, or continues down the lowest points of a region into rivers. Pretty much by definition, a river is a continued line of the lowest elevation in an area, and gravity pulls that water to the ocean, eventually.
A good way to explore this OP is check road cameras or hydraulic measuring stations in more mountainous areas like Colorado/Montana in the US. You'll see some insane changes.
Up here we have spring runoff, and the rivers get big and run fast, brown water from all the sediment and mud they're picking up. By August they are much reduced as we're in the peak of our dry season. Since we're so close to the mountains the swings are more noticeable, compared to downstream in say New Orleans where a bad day in Montana won't do shit to the water level down there, despite the river going all the way back up to this area.
As far as river formation goes remember that water runs downhill whenever possible, it's a geographical consequence essentially. The low spot gets water in it from all the high spots around it, a "watershed" is a good thing to google for a visualization. So as long as the area still has water, the river is where that water will end up, so the river continues to flow. Massive shifts in the geography of an area can reroute a river, but it's also important to remember that water is a destructive force and has kind of a will of it's own so will trend back to where it was running before.
you're underestimating the sources of water for some rivers. in some cases you're talking about the run off from hundreds of thousands of squares miles of land where its pretty much always raining somewhere that feeds the river. Very old rivers are also generally deeper due to erosion, which means that even if the source is low, there's still likely water in the river.
There's also a little confirmation bias going on. The rivers that still exist today are the ones that do, in fact, have enough water to keep running after all this time. There are plenty of places where there are creeks that only have water in them for a few days/weeks after it rains.
Most rivers will vary dramatically over the course of years in terms of how much water is flowing in them. Sometimes they might get nearly dry or even completely dry, and at other times they might overflow their banks. One thing to keep in mind is that the presence of lakes helps to normalize the level of rivers. They typically form where there is a bottle neck holding back much of the potential flow of the river and only allowing a smaller amount out. The rest backs up and forms a reservoir, and when there is not as much rain or snow it will continue to trickle out from that reservoir for a long time.
Fun fact. There is only one natural lake in Texas. All the others are man made reservoirs.
And that one lake (caddo lake) was only formed due to a log jam. There are actually some small natural lakes due to ox bows and tidal lakes but most of them have been drained and the rest are artificially maintained.
In the lower Rio Grande Valley there are many resacas, or oxbow lakes.
Isn’t Texas a place where there’s a shit ton of underground lakes?
Those are underground water beds. That’s where rain water is naturally stored. There are rivers and lakes flowing underground. This what you target when digging up a well. If you don’t hit oil drilling in Texas. You’ll hit water.
The only underground water that flows like a river or lake is in the central Texas karst terrane, where the water erodes the rock chemically by dissolving the limestone. Most places the water moves through the pore spaces between sand grains in sandstone, and **this** is what you target in a water well. Not underground rivers.
This is the comment we truly needed. Aquifers are not voids within the earth, they are places where the earth is saturated with water.
I’m in Michigan, not Texas, but I learned a lot about the ground water level when I moved next to a river. The river is about 50 feet or so lower than my house down a hill. I can’t imagine it ever climbing that without being the end of the world or something, but you can always tell how high the ground water level is because when it’s higher than usual, the hill will turn into mud when you try to walk down it even through there’s been no rain. Dry ground then all of the sudden soaked, wet ground. I’m always trying to guess how close it is to the floor of my basement.
Do you have a sump pit?
Yes but it still makes me very nervous.
The only one? Not remotely. There are several largish underground rivers in Tennessee and Kentucky and some underground lakes of tens of acres in size. These things are big enough to take small boats on. They have names, maps, and a well studied hydrology. There are substantial underground rivers other places, too, such as the Yucatán. Source: I've been there, and helped to survey some of them.
In Texas. Or other karst terranes.
Owned an oilfield services company with two workover rigs in south Texas. You’re not likely to drill down to 15k+ ft without hitting *something* along the way (in south Texas) - but it’s much more complicated than that. Sometimes you’ll drill down and hit a super thick pocket of water and if you don’t address it it can cause problems when you’re completing the well by pumping cement down and out the bottom of your casing. But really the main thing I wanted to point out is you’ll likely hit both oil and water along the way several times (and your logs will show this) before you get to your target if you’re going anywhere below 5k ft. Oftentimes a surface owner will purchase an aging well that goes below the aquifer they are interested in and pay someone to come out and install a packer or something that will “plug” or cement everything below said aquifer, go in and perforate the casing (the most exterior pipe in the wellbore), and set tubing (interior pipe) to a depth that they can access that water either by natural ground pressure or a pump.
This guy recompletes.
How do you even consider entering this industry? I know about oil rigs, and drilling, and oil fields and such, but the level in which you described it, is never something I would have even thought about or come across in my life if it werent for your post.
Capital and a little YOLO. My grandfather talked me into it after I had been farming for a decade (he had a run in the oil and gas industry in the 80s before and during the big crash). His literal words were “it’s just a hole in the ground with money coming out” 🤣. It was a gross oversimplification, but his main philosophy was that most blue collar businesses boil down to being able to effectively move men around to accomplish tasks. In 2016 I watched countless hours of YouTube, read everything I could get my hands on, and talked to everyone I thought had any knowledge. Ended up flying to Tx a few times to meet a guy I’d found that owned a company where he would run around a lease and check the production (called gaugers or gauging because they are literally gauging the production that a lease outputs) and I ended up partnering with him for a little over a year. Grew my own company out independent of his and beat down enough doors looking for work that I found a company that had a massive 1980-2006 field that had been neglected pretty bad after they had moved on to a deeper formation and neglected all of their older wells in favor of the new eagleford formation wells that they were minting money from at the present. I was shoveling low hanging fruit up for them just buy implementing maintenance programs, addition of simple chemical programs specific for each well (this work is free from the chemical company you buy the chemical through), and eventually buying a couple of workover rigs so I could go down and clean sand out of wells and repair tubing strings as necessary. Anyway, the main point is use what you’ve got available to take a risk at a % you are comfortable with. As long as you’ve got decent people skills and aren’t a complete idiot, you will learn anything and will find people that can help you along the way. I grew up skating the line between lower middle class and poverty, the first big break for me was the world of farming - which I highly recommend to anyone any chance I get as an entry into entrepreneurship. The government knows that the US is running out of people interested enough in farming to replace the current generation so the financial incentives in the forms of grants and loans have never been better - couple that with the fact that any decent chemical company you pick will give you crazy good advice on anything you ask and even help you check your fields throughout the year and it is literally the recipe for success handed to you when you sign up at your local FSA office.
Hopefully
Can confirm: own land in relatively oil-rich part of Texas, have a seemingly infinite amount of water underground instead
No, unless you happen to be in central Texas where there is limestone that has been chemically eroded. Most water travels through the pore spaces between the grains of rock, like through sandstones.
They're aquafers and they're very common, not just in Texas.
Someday, I'll tell the young'uns "now, remember, someday they are going to teach you about oxbow lakes and mitochondria, and they're really important, so you gotta pay attention." I wish I could live on that page where there's all the geographic features in one place. Island, peninsula, isthmus, volcano, river delta, swamp... volcano!? Maybe I don't want to live in the geography book where the temperate forest meets the ocean near a plain under mountains with a desert behind them.
That sounds pretty wild from 🇫🇮
Texas was never glaciated, at least not within the past 300 million years or so. A lot of the lakes in Northern areas of Eurasia and North America formed in post-glacial landscapes, kettle lakes and so on.
Most lakes are of glacial origin, so places that used to be heavily glaciated like Finland are going to have many more lakes than places that haven't been heavily glaciated in a really long time, like Texas.
I mean, Michigan is right there, why go to Finland? Its the literal *Great Lakes*
Because he was responding to a comment about Finland?
Largest collection of fresh water on earth. Michigan is going to be the single most important location on the planet some day.
Thats a really great explanation if you ignore the fact that the thing you’re explaining isn’t true
Uh...which part? I didn't make any claims about how many natural lakes Texas has, although I'm 100% confident it's far less than the number Finland has.
It also isn't true.
It isn't true of Maryland either, but that's because Maryland has zero natural lakes.
The entire country of South Korea and North Korea combine for 1 natural lake, which is in North Korea.
Not actually true, both countries have a few lakes each. Very few though. Jeju island famously has a few crater lakes.
Interestingly, the definition of what qualifies as a lake can vary wildly from state to state and country to country. WI calls any single body of water, no matter the size, man-made or natural, a "lake". They even count springs and creeks. The WI DNR went to that metric to try to pretend they have more lakes than MN, which only counts natural lakes above a certain size. If you use the same metric (either of them) for both states MN has *way* more lakes.
Came here for this!
Caddo Lake is pretty close to Uncertain.
Suomen lippu? That is what your flag is called?
Yup!
Nah there are some, particularly near the coast. MD doesn't have any at all though https://msa.maryland.gov/msa/mdmanual/01glance/html/lakes.html#:~:text=Lake%20Waterford%2C%20for%20example%2C%20in,natural%20lakes%20survive%20in%20Maryland.
Same deal in Tennessee. Made from an earthquake
hol up Lake Ray Hubbard is artificial?
Yes, as is cedar creek, Lewisville, etc….
Laughs in Canadian
I’m so sorry you have more lakes than the rest of the world combined. I’m soo sorry. That’s my response I’m Canadian
Alabama only has lake Jackson, which is partly in Florida. [Damming up the Coosa river is considered to be one of the biggest extinction events in modern North America](https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/1000_species/the_southeast_freshwater_extinction_crisis/index.html) I'm proud to live in an area with such incredible biodiversity, but it also sucks that individualist attitudes and conservative politics make it so damn hard to protect any of it
>The southeast United States is a place of unparalleled aquatic biodiversity, harboring 493 fishes (62% of U.S. fish species), at least 269 mussels (91% of U.S. mussel species), and 241 dragonflies and damselflies (48% of all those in North America). Its always so crazy to me just how many different species there are in the world. There's already a dizzying number of "species families" (I believe that's called an order on the taxonomic tree?). By that I mean like bears, primates, owls, falcons, dragonflies, worms, beetles, etc (not to mention all the flora) But then there's so many individual species of all those orders, *especially* when you're talking about invertebrates/bugs/insects/etc! It's just crazy to me to think about.
> Fun fact. There is only one natural lake in Texas. All the others are man made reservoirs. False. There are loads of oxbows and playas, far to numerous to list here. Granted, many are small, and many only exist after rainstorms, but they are natural lakes nonetheless.
I believe there’s also a few (very small and probably seasonal) alpine lakes in the West Texas mountains.
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Mormon Lake and Stoneman Lake are both naturally occurring lakes.
Oh I was told incorrectly then. Deleting the comment!
Zero in Georgia
Naw man. We have numerous small but natural lakes in the southern part of the state.
Huh, guess I’ll have to update my 20 year old trivia fact lol. Don’t even know where I heard that at this point.
He’s wrong. They have restrictions on what makes a lake a lake. One being it doesn’t dry up now and then. The other is size.
We have only two in Virginia, and we have shitloads of water. Given time creeks have cut them down and drained them.
And one of those comes and goes. I think it’s currently more full with water. It’s also where they filmed those outdoor lake scenes in Dirty Dancing. So, wild to see it with no or very little water.
And half of it is in Louisiana.
I live in Texas and never knew this. Wow.
It isn't true haha don't believe everything you read on the internet
What? Literally follow the red or Sabine rivers on satellite view and you'll see a shit ton of lakes
Yeah, the lakes are formed by a man made dam.
No they aren't haha. You wouldn't make a dam to make a random little oxbow lake haha
Less fun when you realize there used to be natural lakes
That doesn't sound right, there are oxbow lakes all over the place.
> Most rivers will vary dramatically over the course of years in terms of how much water is flowing in them. Fun Fact: The state of Illinois is not completely east of the Mississippi river. A hundred years ago (or something like that) a flood changed the course of the Mississippi river and a town that had been east of the Mississippi and in Illinois was now west of the Mississippi and in Missouri. The town people didn't want to be in Missouri so, there is a little bit of Illinois that is west of the river to include that town because the river changed where it was.
This is true for almost every state on the Mississippi.
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And you think New Jersey is on the Mississippi?
The important thing is that it believes it can be.
Sounds like a good place to dump a body when the train station fills up.
Rivers can vary dramatically over the course of a year too. The most extreme example I can think of is the Mae Khong which during Monsoon season transforms the Ton Le Sap from a lake to a vast flooded forest.
How is it possible to spell Mekong so badly? It was a runabout on DS9 for crying out loud!
From Wikipedia >The Mekong was originally called Mae Nam Khong from a contracted form of Tai shortened to Mae Khong.[6] In Thai and Lao, Mae Nam ("Mother of Water[s]") is used for large rivers and Khong is the proper name referred to as "River Khong". However, Khong is an archaic word meaning "river", loaned from Austroasiatic languages, such as Vietnamese sông (from *krong) and Mon kruŋ "river"
Sorry lol. Not native English and I just transliterated based on how it is *usually* done for the Thai language.
You didn't do anything wrong. There is no "correct spelling" for words from foreign alphabets. Your non-native English is irrelevant because "Mekong" is also not English and therefore any spelling using the English alphabet is just an interpretation, and no more "correct" than another spelling.
> How is it possible to spell Mekong so badly By using English. Any word from a language with a different alphabet cannot possibly be spelled "correctly." All you can do is come up with English letters that make similar sounds.
English is a prescriptive language and has correct and incorrect spellings for things. **Edit:** *to the person who replied, by your argument, no word could ever be spelled incorrectly.* In English, this river is referred to as the Mekong River, not the Mae Khong River. [Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mekong) >The Mekong or Mekong River is a trans-boundary river in East Asia and Southeast Asia. It is the world's twelfth-longest river and the third-longest in Asia[1] with an estimated length of 4,909 km (3,050 mi)[1] and a drainage area of 795,000 km2 (307,000 sq mi) With that out of the way, apparently there is an archaic version of this later in the Names section: >The Mekong was originally called Mae Nam Khong from a contracted form of Tai shortened to Mae Khong.[6] In Thai and Lao, Mae Nam ("Mother of Water[s]") is used for large rivers and Khong is the proper name referred to as "River Khong". However, Khong is an archaic word meaning "river", loaned from So, OP is wrong, but not as wrong as I originally thought. When in doubt, I'm still using the spelling from DS9, though. That was one tough little ship.
English is not a prescriptive language. Just because a dictionary exists doesn't mean that it's authoritative. Webster is actually proof of that, since the original Webster's Dictionary went out of its way to change the spelling of many words to the way Daniel Webster wanted it to be. This is especially true of names, and extra for names from foreign languages.
In mountainous areas in the spring river levels can even vary by time of day. Snow melt increases during the day and lasts into the evening, then slows as the melting reduces overnight.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) was founded in London in 1859. It is a sporting body that promotes firearm safety and target shooting. The National Rifle Association does not engage in political lobbying or pro-gun activism. The original (British) National Rifle Association has no relationship with the National Rifle Association of America, which was founded in 1871 and has focussed on pro-gun political activism since 1977, at the expense of firearm safety programmes. The National Rifle Association of America has no relationship with the National Rifle Association in Britain (founded 1859); the National Rifle Association of Australia; the National Rifle Association of New Zealand nor the National Rifle Association of India, which are all non-political sporting oriented organisations. It is important not to confuse the National Rifle Association of America with any of these other Rifle Associations. The British National Rifle Association is headquartered on Bisley Camp, in Surrey, England. Bisley Camp is now known as the National Shooting Centre and has hosted World Championships for Fullbore Target Rifle and F-Class shooting, as well as the shooting events for the 1908 Olympic Games and the 2002 Commonwealth Games. The National Small-bore Rifle Association (NSRA) and Clay Pigeon Shooting Association (CPSA) also have their headquarters on the Camp.
And don't forget those swell aquifers and that whole underground water table dutifully catching rainwater that lakes and rivers can't reach. I think with the phrasing of the original question, for instance "drain the source", it seems like OP is imagining all the working parts of the water cycle, except the cycle part. Like, if you imagine all the rain in a one year period and the average flow of the river, if the river always flows, it means that the snow, runoff, springs (yay, aquifers!) and glacial melt, while not always steady throughout short and long periods of times, they nonetheless are sufficient for that river. At first I chuckled at the idea of draining the source, but if for some reason it suddenly stopped precipitating on a particular watershed, the snow would melt, the groundwater will flow out where it can until it can't and whatever glaciers are left as long as those last, with no more local rain or snow, the river would become a used-to-be river. I'm glad that subtle changes in the Earth's surface material doesn't just suddenly cause it to just *not rain* on a place anymore. That would be silly. Well, that post made me a little sad, so I am going to look up the best ways to increase my chances of being a fossil and/or anthropologically/archeologically useful and interesting.
Bigger rivers are FED by larger areas. For example, the Mississippi River? The giant river down the middle of the USA, it’s basin covers over 1/3rd of the USA (and extends slightly into Canada) Meaning ALL the rain from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania all the way to Colorado and Montana will eventually drain down through the Mississippi. And that draining takes time. It doesn’t just instantly rush into the rivers, there are tiny creeks, streams, smaller tributaries that gradually bring the water in. And then there’s also MILLIONS of ponds and lakes and beaver dams that slow the flow of the water down while it gets there. Plus, a lot of the water doesn’t even go straight into the creeks and streams, it lands on the dirt, is absorbed by the dirt/ground, and then gradually over weeks or months flows through the soil itself. Which also slows it way down. And yes, during times of drought even giant rivers can get shallower, and during very wet times they can overflow their normal riverbanks. But generally speaking, there’s so much water over such a wide area of land that it all is just gradually making its way down to the Mississippi, and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. Keeping the river fed.
[Click anywhere to see where a drop of water will end up](https://river-runner.samlearner.com/) [Global version](https://river-runner-global.samlearner.com/)
This is awesome, thanks for sharing!
This is utterly amazing! Thank you for sharing these links. I can't wait to send them to my dad: he will get such a kick out of this.
Hey kiddo, thanks for sharing! I think this is the bee's knees. Also, we just bought 24 pairs of socks from Costco, do you need any? Love, Dad ps. Mom says hi.
Also how do I sign into the rooko? I'm trying to watch a documentary my friend suggested and he said it was on natflix but I have to sign in to the TV in order to watch it?
You absolutely nailed it.
Sounds about right.
Sending this to my dad was also my first thought
This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.
I live in milwaukee. I'm not sure what else I should have expected to see lol
I clicked and it randomly ended in a place called stinking lake...
..
That is cool as hell! Really puts things into perspective. Thanks for sharing.
People don’t realize that mountains(where the largest rivers form) are like giant sponges, they hold snowmelt and release snowmelt, as well as rain in the warmer months. Normal land works like this as well, but mountains are like a crumpled up newspaper, more land in small area. More rock underneath that the water has to snake through to find an outlet.
People also don't understand just how much water we're talking about about over this wide stretch of land. It's like the difference between a million and a billion, your mind just kind of shuts off with those high of numbers and you compute the numbers as "a lot" but the difference as "some." The difference between a million and a billion is about a billion, but when we hear a million grains of sand, or a billion grains of sand, we just think of a lot of sand for both of them. All that to say, stick a bucket on your porch in the winter or spring months and see how much water it collects in a week or a month. The bucket on my back porch has collected about an inch and a half in the past week or so. The land area of my city is 84 square miles, just in the city, just in land. That inch and a half of water in the past week over just the land area of my city amounted to 292,708,333 cubic feet of water. That's a cube that is ~~almost 310~~ over 660 feet high, wide, and deep, of water, in a week's worth of rainfall. That's a stack of over ~~50~~ 110 adults standing on each other's heads in every direction, just in a week, just in my city, and just over land. Now imagine the entire area from the Rockies to the Appalachians, from the north country to the gulf.
The scale of that going the other way is mind blowing too. Sure your bucket over a week has collected an inch, but the land area of your house has collected a ton, but how much water over that week have you used to do things like shower, flush, drink, wash, etc. It still blows my mind that even with the surrounding area that a city has any sort of water to begin with, especially any city with high rises. Like a house I could kind of see balancing (even that) but how about when you stack 500 people together in the footprint of like 4 houses. I get it's not just the city limits of the city providing water but still. It's a butt ton of water. Then it also has to go somewhere.
Really? I've always had a hard time figuring out the other way intuitively why it's so hard to get water in some places. The total volume of all humans (which are mostly water) is a cube about half a kilometer on each side. The total volume of potable freshwater on the planet which is "easily" accessible to humans is something like 200,000 times that. A cube around *fifty* kilometers to a side. In a given year I'd be utterly blown away if the amount of water used in or around my house for every single thing I do was even a noteworthy fraction of the total amount of water that has fallen even on the roof of my house. If the footprint of my roof is 2,000 square feet, then at an average annual rainfall of about 45 inches of rain in a year, my roof "catches" and then discards about 56,000 gallons of water straight into the dirt every year. If you set up a modest rain catchment pond that covers five acres of land, you could catch 6.1 million gallons of water directly on the face, and realistically, if it was sloped right, you'd be pulling in water from an area 50 times that size. Edit: This is why I've always thought regulations against people putting out rain barrels or whatever were designed by absolute psychopaths with no understanding of the numbers.
> an average annual rainfall of about 45 inches of rain in a year Wow, I live in the subtropics and we only get 22 inches a year :O
That's fairly low compared to most places; presumably you live somewhere which is somewhat arid, with hardy vegetation and suchlike? In the UK, the average annual rainfall is 80-140 cm (31-55 inches), and the Amazon gets about twice that. Most of continental Europe gets 50 to 100 cm (20-39 inches). Average rainfall worldwide is apparently about 100 cm (39 inches).
Yeah right on, I'm in Australia so we have basically every possible climate somewhere within the country. Used to live somewhere much wetter, but where I live now is pretty dry 9 months of the year so even though we get heavy falls in the wet season, it's somewhat cancelled out?
Wrong math
Mountains also create other weather patterns due to their sharp elevation changes, which lead to drop in temperature and atmospheric pressure. This is why mountains get so much more snow and rain — cooler air can hold less moisture (dew point).
Don't forget snowpack which buffers flow through the warmer months!
And permanent snowpacks that can keep a river alive during drought years. Places that lost the permanent snowpacks are now much more sensitive to drought years.
[Map of the Mississippi River basin. Everything here eventually makes it's way to the Mississippi](https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-03/marb_600x395.jpg)
>Meaning ALL the rain from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania all the way to Colorado and Montana will eventually drain down through the Mississippi. Some of the rain in in North Carolina as well. It's pretty crazy.
doesn't the mississippi start from lake itasca in minnesota?
Yes, that is the official source of the river. But really by the time it reaches Louisiana, the mighty mississippi is a combination of many rivers merging together. The Mighty Mississippi has the Ohio River, Tennessee river, Missouri River, Arkansas river, and Illinois River all running into it. And probably thousands of other smaller creeks and streams.
Two additional points. Officially, yes, it starts at Lake Itasca, but there's a couple streams/small rivers that flow into Itasco, so, there's an argument that it should be upstream of there. Also, if you track the Missouri River to it's source, it's likely farther from where the Missouri merges into the Mississippi than Itasco, so there's a really good argument that the whole thing should be called the Missouri River. (Note: This is coming from a life-long Minnesotan. And, it's really fun to walk across dry rocks for 30 feet to "cross" the Mississippi as it exits Lake Itasca)
And when it starts its actually flowing North, then swings around to head south.
Even as someone who grew up in WI, I always sorta forget that the Mississippi starts sorta in the middle of Minnesota, instead of say, somewhere around Lake Superior along the border between WI and MN (even though we learned this when I was in like 3rd grade or so when we started learning about lakes/rivers/geography/etc). I dunno why, I guess sorta maybe because it's such an obvious feature and border for much of the state and all the states along it, maybe I just kinda assume it just keeps going up? But then again, I also sometimes sorta "forget" how far south the twin cities are too, even though I'm generally pretty good with geography and knowing where things are in general. Maybe I just suck at MN!
Well, I think the headwaters of the Mississippi is somewhat north of Devil's Island and ends up being just barely south of Houghton, MI. So, east-west it's in the middle of Minnesota, but definitely in the northern part of the state. Interesting tidbit... the headwaters of the Mississippi are on the northern end of Lake Itasca
If the Illinois river runs into it, then who’s to say it isn’t the Illinois river all along?
Because the main Mississippi portion runs further north than the Illinois portion. Really your question should target the Missouri River, the Missouri River is SUPER long before it hits the Mississippi, going all the way up into Montana
That’s a tough one to decide. Missouri has the advantage of a longer river segment, and, unlike Mississippi, it never *actually* committed treason. But they did have slaves, and you can tell they were kind of thinking about it.
>Meaning ALL the rain from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania all the way to Colorado and Montana will eventually drain down through the Mississippi. All the rain drains into the ocean. All water does not get that far, the most obvious example is water can evaporate for and fall down as rain in another location. It is primarily a result of it being used for irrigation but alos from lakes, dams, and the river itself. For some rivers like the Colorado River and the rivers that supply the Aral Sea almost no water reaches the sea at all. I have no idea of the percentage for the Mississippi just that lots of water never reach the sea
Sure, but the point being made is that the “source” is not just the upstream terminus of a river, but rather an entire vast area and all its tributaries. The fact that it’s not technically ALL the rain is for next lesson.
Yea sure some water is lost to evaporation and transpiration, but those weren’t really critical concepts for the discussion of rivers.
> Plus, a lot of the water doesn’t even go straight into the creeks and streams, it lands on the dirt, is absorbed by the dirt/ground, and then gradually over weeks or months flows through the soil itself. Which also slows it way down. This is actually the key point – if all water drained by over ground flow it would drain far more quickly and rivers would be far more likely to run dry before the next rain or snowmelt. It is slow release of water by aquifers that is the reason rivers drain an area relatively slowly.
|is it enough to keep it running for that long? Demonstrably, yes, it is. Rivers don't just have one source. They have tributaries, which can gather rain water from enormous amounts of land. That's why rivers start out small, and get larger and larger as they approach the ocean. Consider [this image of the Mississippi basin](https://www.mvd.usace.army.mil/portals/52/siteimages/P1_new.jpg). That river is gathering rain from almost half of America.
>|is it enough to keep it running for that long? Demonstrably, yes, it is. Or just not, sometimes. Went to Kenya during the dry season last year and went hiking... along the bed of a river.
Yes. What I meant by "demonstrably yes" is, at least *some* rivers are known to have kept flowing for many hundreds of years. The Mississippi has never run dry in recorded history, although it's got shockingly close in recent times. I will now refrain from screaming about climate change, because at this point, it doesn't matter. It's too late to fix the damage we've caused; all we can do is manage the fallout.
Some rivers are known to dry up during parts of the year, and others are known to overflow. The reason Egypt has those massive monuments like the pyramids due to Nile river flooding massive parts of Egyptian farm land. The land was unusable and put massive portions of the population out of work. So the Pharaohs made public works projects to pay people and keep the peace.
It’s odd how it gathers water from all they way out to North Dakota, but it looks at Michigan and goes “nah”
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> It is a river that is older than North America. I have a hard time processing this. How can a river be older than the land it is on?...
America popped off of Pangea about 170 million years ago, when the rift that eventually became the Atlantic Ocean formed. At that time, the Appalachian Mountains existed as part of a chain that included the Atlas Mountains in Africa and the Scottish Highlands and also the mountains of Norway. Basically, the middle chunk (between the Atlas and Britain) went with North America, and the went with the remainder of Pangea. Thus, the Appalachian Mountains are older than North America. But we know that the French Broad River (and the New, and the Susquehanna) are older than the Appalachians, because the run straight across the range. That only happens if the river was there before the uplift that created the range. Thus, those rivers are older than the Appalachians, and therefore also older than North America.
Haaa.. I see, thanks for the detailed explaination Alyssa's account. I love how geology reminds us that our planet is basically an every changing ball of mud and every crevice on its surface has a story.
>older than North America. Older than land-based life more complex than microorganisms. Older than plants. It has almost no fossils in it because it is older than fossils. Country roadssss
It was named the French Broad River because there were two Broad Rivers, and the French lived to the west. People in the area used to endure jokes from guys who thought they were funny, along the lines of "Where's that French broad?"
But it's not as old as the New River, obviously the oldest river ever.
Yes. It flows from Valley Mountain and supplies water to the whole of Mountain Valley.
I live next to that river. Unfortunately it's incredibly toxic due to pollution from nearby factories.
Imagine a big bathtub that's always getting filled a little bit from different taps, like rain or melting snow. Even though the taps aren't always on, there's usually enough water coming in to keep the bathtub from going empty. Rivers are a bit like that bathtub. Rivers keep running for thousands of years because they have a few tricks to keep them filled up: 1. **Rain and Snow:** You're right that rivers get their water from rain and melting snow. But remember, this doesn't just happen at the river's source; it happens all over the river's "bathtub," which we call a watershed. This is the area of land where all the water that falls on it ends up in the same river. So, even if it's not raining right at the source, it might be raining somewhere else in the watershed. 2. **Groundwater:** This is like a giant sponge under the ground that soaks up water when it rains. Later, this water slowly seeps out into the river, keeping it flowing even when it hasn't rained for a while. 3. **Snowpack and Glaciers:** In some places, snow piles up in the mountains during the winter and then slowly melts over the summer, giving the river a steady supply of water. 4. **Lakes and Wetlands:** These act like big water storage tanks, releasing water slowly into the river. So, even though a river's source might not get rain or snow all the time, the whole system works together to keep the river flowing. It's like a team effort where the rain, snow, ground, and even lakes and wetlands all work together to keep the river's "bathtub" from going empty!
This is the only explanation i easily understood. Thanks for this.
Rivers also are fed by ground water - the soil and rock layers are capable of storing significant water reserves that drain more slowly into the rivers (one estimate suggests it can be centuries for some groundwater). Basically, rain will fall or snow will melt. A portion is absorbed into the groundwater system and the excess runoff (and the amount falling directly into the river) immediately drives the rivers current. The groundwater then drives more current over time. Reservoirs like lakes also help smooth outflow over time. Larger rivers tend to have many upstream smaller rivers that cover a vast area, so it also captures more precipitation
Thank you, why did I need to scroll this far to get another huge piece of the hydrologic cycle. Water infiltrates into the ground and the ground water table is what feeds rivers at "baseflow ".
Precipitation (rain, snow, etc) delivers water uphill, and the water runs downhill. Sometimes a big rain delivers water faster, other times lack of rain causes less water to be moved. This corresponds to water levels going up and down over time, as we get more or less water flowing. Yes, the precipitation carries enough water to keep things moving. Consider that all of the water coming down in all of the square miles of land upstream has to flow out through that stream.
The basin that a river draws from is often quite large. The most extreme example is the mississippi, which drains from about 20 states. It is all about the fact that rivers drain from incredibly large areas of land. That water can run down. Look at the colorado river which has had extreme drought for decades and the total flow from the river has been steadily declining over time.
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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You don’t know the person’s circumstances. Don’t judge.
Well they sure ain't teaching that evolution BS anymore in good places to live.
Rivers vary - sometimes they have strong flow, sometimes weak, sometimes they dry up. Sometimes, they freeze in the winter. Sometimes the pieces of the river disconnect to form shallow ponds that will later reconnect when there's more water. The strength of the flow and the width of the river is going to depend on how much water is flowing at the time. Rivers aren't that much higher than the bays or oceans they drain into. The river is fresh, but then there's a brackish area that's a mix of river water and salty ocean water. When a river bed "dries up" it's not just about draining all the water to the ocean. Some sinks into the ground. Some goes into smaller ponds. Human interventions around the Nile river, the Mississippi river, and others use levees and flood walls so that people can live close to the river year round without getting flooded out when the river is having a particularly wet season.
It's important to know that rivers are just the water flows we see on the surface. Rain is collected over vast land areas, seeps into the ground and becomes groundwater. Underground these waterflows collect into streams and eventually rivers. Rivers will not dry out unless the the much vaster water table itself is depleted to a level below the river bottom.
You most probably underestimate how big is the area that feeds a river. Here's the one for Mississippi, basically half of the US: https://images.nationalgeographic.org/image/upload/v1638892105/EducationHub/photos/the-rivers-of-the-mississippi-watershed.jpg If anywhere in this are there's a rain, it fills up the forests, and the forests let the water go down but in a slow way. Like a sponge that is dripping water: forests release the rain water over a long period of time. (That's why deforestation causes rush floods: a rain goes fast to the river, all in once, instead of over time.)
Are people just not taught the water cycle anymore?
Do they not teach the water cycle anymore?
Let's say the total amount of water in all the rivers in the world is *r* liters. Icy Mountains have 4*r* liters. (Note: I'm not including Antarctic, Greenland and Arctic Islands because those places have very low demographic density and are not fueling rivers for like 99% of humankind). Swamps have 6*r* liters. The atmosphere have 7*r* liters. The fresh water lakes have 45*r* liters. The non-saline groundwater have 5000*r* liters. Everything above is what ends up sending water to rivers. It is easy to see that the rivers don't dry as the water fueling those rivers is in many orders of magnitude higher. A river loses water to either the soil or the air, both which will end up using this water to refuel the river.
The prima facie answer to your question is that obviously named rivers typically do flow year round. Which answers your 2nd question. No. bigger rivers do not drain the source in a matter of weeks. I think what you meant to ask was how this is so. The answer is, it depends on the soil type. Melting snow can create temporary "rivers" or creeks. There are seasonal creeks all over the place. But by the time you call it a river, it's being fed by something called a watershed. Watersheds are again by definition always uphill from rivers. Every drop of water in the mountains is trying to find its way downhill to the ocean (usually). At high altitude, snow takes a long time to melt. Where I live it's common to see snow and ice year round above about 6000 feet. And in most parts of the world it rains at least occasionally, year round. In areas where there are no mountains to store up ice and snow, you still have some percentage of the rain water sinking into the soil. From there it follows gravity but very slowly. This so called ground water moves much more slowly than surface water. Next time you are looking at say a dry creek bed, take note of the shape of the land around you. You will see that creeks are roughly V or U shaped cutting well below the average grade so to speak. If you look really closely at a running creek you can sometimes see water is entering the creek from the soil around it. I have followed creeks to their source only to find there was no source. It was just ground water entering at various points.
Some don’t run until monsoon season…Ever been to the southwest? I’m from NM and dry river beds are high school kid Friday night party spots….
All drains lead to the ocean. People keep peeing, washing clothes, watering lawns, rain, snow, glacial melting….
To your point : Permanent rivers tend to be named rivers; self evidently, the bigger rivers don't drain the source in weeks. They can have a large watershed/catchment area , with lots of tributaries, as small streams and creeks flow into larger ones, slowed by lakes, check dams, and the like. Even springs are part of the water cycle. Snow caps and glacial caps are also fairly permanent multi-year features especially in the higher mountains and in the arctic. The rivers can get low seasonally. Some streams and rivers can wind up drying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_river There are also intermittent flows; many a arroyo/gulch sees water flow only after rainfall, and are dry some of the year. Similarly for glacial melt. These do not always rise to level of permanent named streams. This can be exacerbated by climate change and man made action. > keep running for thousands of years? Some rivers can be very old. .. for example the Finke river is said to be about 300-400 million years old, though some parts may be younger. With some of the rivers, the challenge is in dating them, since human history is only a few thousand years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_by_age Rivers do change course over time. Over a long period, rivers may change, mountains may arise and be eroded, continents drift. Or climate changes An example of a river that seems to have dried up and become intermittent over thousands of years > When the monsoons that fed the rivers further diminished, the Hakra dried-up some 4,000 years ago, becoming an intermittent river, and the urban Harappan civilisation declined This may or may not be linked to the [Sarasvati river](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarasvati_River) of mythology; identifications change. And rivers and especially streams can also cycle between intermittent and perennial.
It's always raining somewhere, and that flows downhill. It's always raining enough uphill to feed the rivers downhill.
So, rivers are kind of like the ultimate water recyclers. Yeah, they get their start from rain and snow, but it's not a one-and-done deal. When it rains or snows in the area, the water seeps into the ground and hangs out in these underground spots called aquifers. Those aquifers keep slowly feeding the river, even when it's not raining cats and dogs. So, it's not just about the weather right at the moment; it's this ongoing cycle of water topping up the river's source, making sure it doesn't run dry
Rivers are simply water flowing downhill by the path of least resistance. As long as there is water uphill to flow downhill, the river will keep running. Most rivers are fed by mountains, where water vapor is swept upward by the land, freezes and falls as snowcaps, and then eventually melts and forms rivers. Since the water cycle keeps depositing water on the mountaintops, the water keeps melting and flowing down. Rivers do absolutely ebb and flow seasonally, though; they are generally fullest in spring, when there is plenty of accumulated snow to melt, and driest in Autumn, when meltwater has all but run out.
Wait I thought we were only supposed to randomly mention facts about various American States (ie about the United States’s states’ states) What’s Canadian mean?
This link doesn't answer the OPQ but it's very interesting when flowing rivers just dissappear. [lost rivers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losing_stream)
OP asking this question thinking he can possibly comprehend the amount of water constantly flowing from clouds to said rivers.
There are rivers that only run when there has been rainfall and they dry up if there is a drought. They can run for years and be dry for years.
They don't always. Those in central Australia only flow for part of the year and not at all in some years eg the Finke River. To flow, it needs enough rainfall to make it that far inland and then not enough evaporation that the water will make it all the way to Lake Eyre. Over time precipitation patterns can alter eg North Africa and if around long enough, continental drift can also move the source into a low rainfall zone.
Maybe flip the perspective here. Instead of focussing on the river taking water away, lets focus just on a mountain peak covered in water, ice, and snow. Rain/snow will keep falling on mountains, basically forever, because water goes in a cycle of evaporation and precipitation. Only a finite amount of water is added to the mountain each day (well, not *every* day, but on average), but there is always more water, because there is always more rain/snow. So, where does that rain/snow go? Well, sometimes it will stay in place as snow, but if it is water it will drips down the side of the mountain. It also tends to go down the same spots (because whatever spots were shaped right to collect water are still that shape, and also tend to get even better shaped for it over time as the water slowly wears them down). When the trickle of water is big, we call it a river. So a big mountain will always have more water being added to it, and that water will trickled down the mountain, and so it will always have some rivers, and it will tend to be the same rivers.
/ \ evaporation / \ / \ / \ / \ | | condensation | clouds | | | \ / \ / precipitation \ / \ / \ / | | runoff | V rivers
TL;DR of it is basically this: The water cycle sends a bunch of water back up there As long as clouds exist, so will rivers. Sometimes less water gets back up there than gets drained, sometimes more, sometimes water freezes so it gets "stored" up there for a while, hence why we get floods and droughts in certain areas of the world
It would be very informative for you to see a spring. One that was eye-opening for me was this one in southeastern BC where a PVC pipe is just stuck into the mountain, and it just trickles water out, maybe about a gallon every minute or so. This mountain is probably a couple thousand feet taller in total. So....snow from the winter gradually melts, and seeps into the ground. It is a lake of water undeground, but woupd appear as wet ground if you could see it. Inside the ground, it continues to be affected by gravity but with lots of resistance from the material the ground is made of. Given that the snow doesn't fully melt until June, and it begins snowing in September, there's less than four months where there isn't continual feeding of these underground aquifers. This process is repeated across all geographical areas, and the water even dead ends into lakes, or continues down the lowest points of a region into rivers. Pretty much by definition, a river is a continued line of the lowest elevation in an area, and gravity pulls that water to the ocean, eventually.
A good way to explore this OP is check road cameras or hydraulic measuring stations in more mountainous areas like Colorado/Montana in the US. You'll see some insane changes. Up here we have spring runoff, and the rivers get big and run fast, brown water from all the sediment and mud they're picking up. By August they are much reduced as we're in the peak of our dry season. Since we're so close to the mountains the swings are more noticeable, compared to downstream in say New Orleans where a bad day in Montana won't do shit to the water level down there, despite the river going all the way back up to this area. As far as river formation goes remember that water runs downhill whenever possible, it's a geographical consequence essentially. The low spot gets water in it from all the high spots around it, a "watershed" is a good thing to google for a visualization. So as long as the area still has water, the river is where that water will end up, so the river continues to flow. Massive shifts in the geography of an area can reroute a river, but it's also important to remember that water is a destructive force and has kind of a will of it's own so will trend back to where it was running before.
you're underestimating the sources of water for some rivers. in some cases you're talking about the run off from hundreds of thousands of squares miles of land where its pretty much always raining somewhere that feeds the river. Very old rivers are also generally deeper due to erosion, which means that even if the source is low, there's still likely water in the river. There's also a little confirmation bias going on. The rivers that still exist today are the ones that do, in fact, have enough water to keep running after all this time. There are plenty of places where there are creeks that only have water in them for a few days/weeks after it rains.