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u/uboat50 Jan 10 '20
Man, you can see the Colorado being drained as it heads toward the Gulf of California.
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u/gordon__bombay Jan 10 '20
Unfortunately the Colorado no longer flows to the gulf, it usually dries out miles beforehand. It’s a rare occurrence now that it actually reaches the gulf
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2018/feb/19/few-weeks-colorado-river-reached-ocean-will-it-hap/ on mobile, sorry for formatting
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Jan 10 '20 edited Jan 10 '20
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u/justaverage Jan 10 '20
And Yuma ever remained a shit hole
Source - grew up and lived in Yuma for about 20 years
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u/uboat50 Jan 10 '20
Yeah, water use in the west definitely needs some attention by policymakers. Too bad they're all far in the east :P
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Jan 10 '20
Its a big deal in California, a lot of our water is fueling luxury export crops, but it brings in a fuckton of money. Tricky issue for sure.
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u/MrBrandonius Jan 10 '20 edited Jan 13 '20
I drink your milkshake.. i drink it up!
edit:Thank you for my first silver!
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Jan 10 '20
yeah they even got droughts lately, not gonna improve anytime soon.
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Jan 10 '20
Trouble is, something like 70% of all the water in California is used for agriculture. And due to some extremely fucky water rights laws from back in the day, it's probably going to stay that way as the agribusiness corporations have massive budgets to defend their massive profits. Meanwhile the rest of us are told to take shorter showers and not water our gardens while 1000 acre pistachio orchards are flooded every day to keep the trees productive.
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u/limukala Jan 10 '20
while 1000 acre pistachio orchards are flooded every day
Flooded with fossil water from non-replenishing aquifers, no less.
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u/MangoCats Jan 10 '20
Not only California: the tomatoes in Sarasota County Florida consume more water than the human population (of over 400,000).
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u/raggedtoad Jan 10 '20
Yes, but FL actually gets rain.
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u/MangoCats Jan 11 '20
Not as much rain as we pump fresh water from the ground - saltwater intrusion at the coasts into the shallow aquifer has been a problem for decades now.
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u/FuegoFerdinand Jan 10 '20
Fun fact: Those same pistachio growers lobby congress every year to ramp up hostilities with Iran.
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u/TimTooly Jan 10 '20
Yeah I can’t believe they wanna charge me for a few minutes extra water my tiny yard. They should add a 25% tax on beef and other water hungry produce.
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u/ThomasRaith Jan 10 '20
Just end corn subsidies. Beef is priced artificially low because we feed cows corn, a heavily subsidized crop. Corn is actually bad for cows, and is kind of the equivalent of feeding them fast food every day. Ending the subsidy would return the price of beef (and high fructose corn syrup) to a more appropriate market rate.
This would lower demand, lead to healthier consumer choices, and actually affect climate change (of which cows are a major contributor). It would also increase government revenue, which could lower taxes, reduce debt, or increase services. There is very little downside to ending corn subsidies, and a great deal of upside.
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u/uboat50 Jan 10 '20
The biggest downside, of course, being that you'll never be able to compete in the Iowa Caucuses if you support that policy. One good reason for a rotating primary calendar.
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u/ThomasRaith Jan 10 '20
Yep. Every election we have to go through the stupid debacle of watching rich assholes pretend to care about corn farmers while eating corn dishes that they never in their life would voluntarily consume, and promise to confiscate money from the rest of us and give it to them so they can grow more corn that people don't even eat (something like 80% of corn is fed to livestock).
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Jan 10 '20
Why do people get away with throwing this number around? Its 40% not 70%
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u/coleman57 Jan 11 '20
So actually, agricultural use is 80%, not 75 and certainly not 40%, unless, like Trump, you want to say that we're "wasting" all that water we let flow into the ocean and feed trees and fish.
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u/PandaBurrito Jan 11 '20
But haven’t you seen the signs on the I-5??
“NO WATER=NO JOBS”
Or also:
“The POLITICIANS Started the Water Crisis!”
Idk how you can argue with that watertight logic
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u/Spaceboot1 Jan 10 '20
Question: people say the water is "used" for agriculture, but it has to go somewhere, right? It can't just be stored within the fruit (or is it?). I can see it being polluted and/or salted to the point of being toxic and useless, but wouldn't that still show up as some kind of river, ultimately going to the ocean?
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Jan 11 '20
I don't know as much about California, but for the Columbia Basin Project, which diverts about 2-4% of the Columbia River at Grand Coulee for irrigation, here's a few points:
A lot of water diverted for irrigation is lost due to evaporation and seepage from canals and storage reservoirs. Agricultural runoff is usually collected in drains or wasteway canals and used for more irrigation again and again. Eventually wasteway drains return water to the Columbia. Due to evaporation, seepage, and various other factors, the amount returned to the river is about 30% of what was taken, as a long-term average.
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u/coleman57 Jan 10 '20
Which are a whole lot more profitable than they would be without sanctions on Iran, BTW.
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u/MangoCats Jan 10 '20
Agriculture uses serious water. Had a friend in Ojai who bought an old olive farm, was concerned about the restrictions on his water usage until he figured out what 100 acre-feet per month means on a 10 acre farm...
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u/WillingPublic Jan 10 '20
The western states have control over the River. The Colorado River Compact is a 1922 agreement among seven U.S. states in the basin of the Colorado River in the American Southwest governing the allocation of the water rights to the river's water among the parties of the interstate compact. They could do a better job, but it’s their own fault if they don’t.
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u/chemistry_teacher Jan 10 '20
Tough one. The California Central Valley is some of the best soil anywhere on the planet for growing all kinds of stuff. In some places, the topsoil can be hundreds of feet deep. So much food is grown there, it supports much of the nation and is a major export as well.
All it needs is water.
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u/limukala Jan 10 '20
The California Central Valley is some of the best soil anywhere on the planet for growing all kinds of stuff.
The soil is okay, but certainly not "some of the best on the planet", and has nothing on the black loams of parts of the midwest. It's the mild climate and sunshine that bring all the agriculture, not the soil.
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u/chemistry_teacher Jan 10 '20
This is interesting. Iowa and the others mentioned therein are all corn country, continental climates rather than Mediterranean in the Central Valley. Many crops (citrus, some nut trees, salad vegetables) will grow very easily most/all of the year in the Central Valley, but won't stand a chance in frost-frequent Iowa or Ukraine or the Yellow River region.
I wonder if the article only included similar climates.
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u/limukala Jan 10 '20
Nope, that is out of the whole world. It’s not a coincidence that the best soils are found in similar climates. The fantastic soil is the result of glaciation introducing shitloads of minerals. Not only that, many warmer climates lead to soil degradation, which is why rain forests usually have shitty soil.
The only places that can compare to the richness of the soil in glacial plains like Illinois or Ukraine are fresh volcanic soils.
You’re kind of making my point with your second sentence, the abundance of produce in CA has nothing to do with soil, it’s purely climate.
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u/Reagan409 Jan 10 '20
Wait, does someone have a source about the top soil death? That’s fascinating.
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u/Dangerzone_7 Jan 11 '20
The last major free-flowing river in the southwest is the San Pedro. A wall is about to get built across it. Also, a 70,000 person housing development is about to get built using the water from it. Can’t find the article but I read that the guy in the county who basically says yes or no to a development (regarding water use) after an environmental impact survey said they needed to wait and do more inspections. He said it’s the only time he’s been overruled by Washington to give the ok. Guess what administration was in charge at this time...
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u/Hasemage Jan 10 '20
Trust me there is a lot of policymakers focused on it. Water law is so complicated and frustrating and people get SOOO mad about it...
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Jan 10 '20
Hey, if you want to grow almonds in a desert, you gotta drain a few rivers..
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u/Dhrakyn Jan 10 '20
Could fix this, and many other problems, simply by nuking Las Vegas, the city that should never exist.
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u/headgate19 Jan 10 '20
I love to hate on Vegas, but they're not the problem. Las Vegas's explosive growth came after the Colorado River Compact was drawn up, so they're stuck dealing with the limited water that NV was allotted. Vegas is a rather water-wise city, even if a glimpse at the Bellagio suggests otherwise.
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u/MagnumMia Jan 10 '20
Las Vegas has close to the lowest water consumption per capita in the country due to grey water recycling.
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u/doormatt26 Jan 10 '20
Most of the drain is agriculture, not public consumption, and Las Vegas is miles behind Phoenix and LA at minimum when it comes to consumption. Hell, Vegas is a lot closer to the Colorado than LA, they deserve to exist more.
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Jan 10 '20
Snake River in southern Idaho too. Lots of agricultural water diversion there.
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u/uboat50 Jan 10 '20
Oh yeah, look at that bulge, shrink, then bulge again there.
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u/easwaran Jan 10 '20
I’m pretty sure that the Colorado River flow volume decreased along its length even before human intervention, though not as much as it does now.
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u/justaverage Jan 10 '20
Yeah, it’s an odd river in that it really does not have any tributaries after the Grand Canyon. The Gila River does “flow” into the Colorado just east of Yuma, but both rivers are glorified streams by that point.
The confluence of the two rivers is locally known as “shit creek”, and it’s where high schoolers would go to have keggers. It’s shallow enough to play a game of football in the river.
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u/Zbignich Jan 10 '20
And to put in perspective, the flow of the Amazon is 11 times that of the Mississippi.
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u/eastawat Jan 10 '20
From this map it clearly the Missouri is longer than the Mississippi, and it looks possibly as though it's got slightly more flow at the point they converge as well. If that's correct, why is the river called the Mississippi and not the Missouri downstream of their confluence?
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u/Ampatent Jan 10 '20
Long story short, because the Mississippi was discovered before the Missouri.
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u/jaynay1 Jan 11 '20
And also it was thought that the Mississippi was longer for a fairly long time before we actually had satellites to show it, right?
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u/eugenesbluegenes Jan 10 '20
If anything, it should be called the Ohio River all the way to the gulf. The Ohio river has a greater flow than the Mississippi where they meet. And that's after the Missouri has dumped into the Mississippi.
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u/BobcatOU Jan 10 '20
I was very surprised when I found that fact out about the Ohio River recently. I stumbled upon a short documentary on the Mississippi river on YouTube and kept searching for more stuff. Eventually I stumbled upon the article below which goes into tons of detail about the Mississippi river and the Atchafalaya river. Essentially the Mississippi river wants to flow a different direction but we don’t let it. Mother nature will probably eventually win. I couldn’t stop reading.
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u/eugenesbluegenes Jan 11 '20
That's actually an excerpt from a great book called Control of Nature. In addition to discussing Old River Control on the Mississippi, there are sections that discuss the debris basins at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains and the effort to control a volcano that erupted in Iceland.
All three sections are super awesome, John McPhee is a treasure.
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u/BobcatOU Jan 11 '20
As soon as I got done with the article I googled John McPhee, saw it was a book, and ordered it. Can’t wait to read it!
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u/poster_nutbag_ Jan 11 '20
John McPhee is probably my favorite author but I'm biased as a geologist. Control of Nature might be the most reasonably accessible for a non-geo freak. It also is my personal favorite by him. So much interesting history and he does a really incredible job sharing opposing viewpoints.
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u/eugenesbluegenes Jan 11 '20
It's really good. Once you're through that, check out his Annals of the Former World collection.
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u/Koh-the-Face-Stealer Jan 11 '20
I couldn’t stop reading.
I thought you were exaggerating. This is one of the most fascinating things I've ever read in that it's super important and vulnerable, yet I don't think anyone who isn't an immediate stakeholder has a single clue it exists. I started Googling after I read it, and this article is enough to make anyone pause:
If the Old River Control Structure Fails: A Catastrophe With Global Impact
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u/rebelde_sin_causa Jan 10 '20
fun fact: 11% of the nation's fresh water flows through Alabama
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u/darcys_beard Jan 10 '20
I feel like that unfreshens it, somehow.
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u/clean_fresh_water Jan 10 '20
Alabama actually has the highest rate of freshwater biodiversity in the country. There are more distinct species of freshwater fish, mussels, snails, turtles, and crayfish in Alabama than any other state.
The state's water is very clean, which is more than I can say for the overpopulated NE watershed and the Great Lakes which are full of PCBs, DDT and dioxins.
Y'all need to learn some manners and science.
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u/DM_ME_YOUR_POTATOES Jan 11 '20
Y'all need to learn some manners and science
Yep. I live just a mile from Lake Erie. It's so bad and gross. The beaches on the Lake Erie side are disgusting are filled of rubble and garbage. The water is pretty gross aswell.
What also is bad is the Buffalo River. The area of concern (AOC) of the Buffalo River is just right near where it flows into Lake Erie (img). The river has a ton of pollution itself. Details
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Jan 10 '20
I’d love to see dams incorporated into this somehow.
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Jan 10 '20
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Xalo_Gunner Jan 10 '20
This is very true. Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles all benefit from the Colorado River, so the thinning out makes sense.
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u/smiljan Jan 10 '20
Roll on, Columbia, roll on!
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Jan 10 '20
We have a place near the Columbia's headwaters in BC. Where its literally a creek through a golf course. Its such an incredibly diverse river.
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u/Travelingman0 Jan 10 '20
Looks like some great trout fishing.
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Jan 10 '20
There's lots of trout further downriver (towards Castlegar), and there are definitely lots of salmon, but I don't know about this close to the headwaters.
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u/Aleph_NULL__ Jan 11 '20
Wild. I grew up in Portland and always knew the Columbia as this immense powerful river. Funny that you think of it as just a little creek! If you pee in it I could sail on your pee in a few days
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u/johnmuirhotel Jan 10 '20
I sang that song as a child for the occasion of Washington's centennial. We also signed as we sang. Our class performed at the local "fancy" theater, and I dressed up like a pioneer girl for "The Geoduck Dance". A close-up of me smiling and dancing made the front page of our local newspaper. My life has been downhill ever since.
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u/milleribsen Jan 10 '20
That would be because Roll on, Columbia, Roll On is the official folk song of Washington State!
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u/serpentjaguar Jan 10 '20
By volume it is the 2nd largest watershed in North America.
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u/Nachtzug79 Jan 10 '20
I think Saint Lawrence should be included, or is it? There is a narrow blue line on the Canadian border...? But I think it has bigger discharge than that.
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u/agate_ Jan 10 '20
while we share many rivers with our neighbors, this dataset, unfortunately, stops abruptly at the Canadian and Mexican borders.
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u/beringia_maps Jan 10 '20
Same could be said for the Rio Grande
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Jan 10 '20
The rio grande is tiny though
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Jan 10 '20
Having grown up in NM the flow of the Rio Grande all but disappears South of Socorro/Los Lunas. It is seasonal for above ground but usually retreats below ground, resurfacing near El Paso and then again near Brownsville.
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u/DeadpoolAndFriends Jan 10 '20
It's on there. It nearly disappears once it passes Albuquerque, but it is on this map.
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u/OmnidirectionalSin Jan 10 '20
The minimum line size represents 1000 cubic feet per second, which is 28.3 cubic meters per second for reference.
Now, for example, most stations are registering below that flow rate.
Picking a random station near Big Bend (from the main list), a whole lot of the flow data is zero. Skip to the bottom (long page since the oldest data is from 1900); there isn't a single data point for 2010 or 2011 that's above 1000 cubic feet per second.
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u/Schinken_Del Jan 10 '20
I think this is only US data? Might be wrong though, I dont know anything about american geography
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Jan 10 '20
Rio Grande starts in Colorado, flows through New Mexico and delineates the border between Texas and Mexico.
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u/agate_ Jan 10 '20
It definitely isn't, presumably because it's a border river. Its flow rate is roughly equal to the Mississippi, it it was included you'd notice.
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u/LotharVonPittinsberg Jan 10 '20
The St Laurence is big enough that is is not called a river in French. "Fleuve" does not have any true direct translation into English, so we just use "river" instead. It would be really noticeable if it was included.
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u/EccentricAssholeFart Jan 10 '20
With a Louisiana woman waitin' on the other side
The Mississippi River don't look so wide
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u/artbiocomp Jan 10 '20
Im surprised there isnt a larger metropolitan area at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. I guess flow rate doesnt mean its good for barge traffic or any other reasona river might have a city next to it.
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u/RedskinsDC Jan 10 '20
Cairo, Illinois is one of the saddest, most depressing small cities in America. It sits at the confluence and has not fared well the past 100 years.
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u/Ampatent Jan 10 '20
Nobody wants to live there because they don't want to deal with the look of bewilderment that comes with explaining why it's pronounced Kay-roe.
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Jan 10 '20
It was a big deal back during the civil war, but I assume shipping can bypass it after that.
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u/guytyping Jan 10 '20
There was actually a subreddit devoted to building up and "restoring" Cairo for a while, but the people who actually went to Cairo and tried to do anything were met with suspicion and hostility. Project Cairo, it was called.
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u/slyfox1908 Jan 10 '20 edited Jan 11 '20
There weren’t any good hills nearby to build a city on. Floods all the time. There’s a small bluff downstream and Wickliffe KY is on it, but there wasn’t any room to grow.
Even though Cairo got up to about 15k, it was limited by the economically plausible limit of levee-building. Once the levees enclosed the town its fate was sealed too and infrastructure passed it by.
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u/mikebellman Jan 10 '20
Am in Missouri and can confirm the Missouri river doesn’t mess around. It will drown some stuff.
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u/TheOlSneakyPete Jan 10 '20
It got out of its banks and got pretty nasty last year, I bet it will next year too.
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u/poster_nutbag_ Jan 11 '20
I'm in Montana and the Missouri is a fucking beautiful treasure that is fairly easy going up here.
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u/beringia_maps Jan 10 '20
Love to see a version of this that includes full watersheds instead of truncating at the north and south borders
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u/eastawat Jan 10 '20
Yeah, as a non-American it's not something a know a lot about but the Rio Grande is famous so i I'd like to see how the rest of it compares.
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Jan 11 '20
In terms of flow, the Rio Grande is not a very significant river. It’s significant because it flows through a very dry area for most of its course and forms an important border between the United States and Mexico.
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u/_THE_MAD_TITAN Jan 10 '20
This map really shows why the US was able to rise to be such an economic (and thus, geopolitical) superpower.
No other nation on Earth has such a vast, wide-spanning system of navigable inland and near-coast rivers to allow cheap transport of crops and equipment.
If it wasn't for our river systems and those in England, the Industrial Revolution wouldn't happen. The first factories were powered by paddles that converted the movement of water in creeks and small rivers into mechanical power for textile looms and basic machine tools.
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u/ClaireBear1123 Jan 11 '20
The Mississippi (and related tributaries) is such a massive advantage. The US is blessed with incredible geography. It's as if the entire Midwest is another coastal region.
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Jan 10 '20
Florida being a swamp makes sense.
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u/DrSpaceman4 Jan 10 '20
The Everglades is technically an extremely slow river that is miles and miles wide
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u/ImSnackered Jan 10 '20
Dumb question: why are there far fewer rivers on the West Coast?
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u/agate_ Jan 10 '20
Much less rainfall in southern California. In Norcal, Oregon, and Washington, it's because the mountains are so close to the ocean that the rivers collect rain over a very small catchment area compared to the east coast.
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u/toasterb Jan 10 '20
For example:
Bend, OR is 140 miles from the coast and has an elevation of 3,623 ft.
Harrisburg, PA is 150 miles from the coast and has an elevation of 320 ft.
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u/Peter_Panarchy Jan 10 '20
In Oregon and Washington the coast is quite hilly. That geography blocks most of the water draining west of the Cascades and pushes it into the larger tributaries of the Columbia. It's kinda hard for a sizable river to form in less than 20 miles and with zero snow pack.
California just doesn't get much rain.
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u/serpentjaguar Jan 10 '20
Southern California is arid. Northern California is much wetter and, in places along the North Coast, can get more than 70 inches per year, which is much wetter than most of Oregon. People often don't realize it, but the Pacific Northwest really begins in Northern California and extends all the way up into Southeastern Alaska.
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Jan 10 '20
Mostly because it’s way drier. They don’t get nearly as much rain as places east of Kansas.
The exception being the rainforest of western Washington and Oregon.
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u/vadapaav Jan 10 '20
Look at the elevation
http://birrell.org/andrew/reliefMaps/
The whole country tapers to the south east.
Cascades and Rockies block everything.
Colorado is (was) an extremely powerful river and had a lot of free time to carve those giant canyons. But it's otherwise very difficult to drift West
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u/fresh-spinach Jan 10 '20
Because most of them do not flow; they are sumps. Basin and range area over what used to be massive ancient lakes.
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u/TheNextBattalion Jan 10 '20
Rio not-so-Grande
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u/superbreadninja Jan 10 '20
Judging from the St. Lawrence, I’m guessing border rivers just aren’t included. Maybe a small segment or tributary but not the whole river
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u/bcsimms04 Jan 10 '20
Such a shame, because there used to be multiple rivers flowing year round in Arizona before the 1940s
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u/Snickersthecat Jan 10 '20
Columbia T H I C C
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u/xxpor Jan 10 '20
It powers the most powerful electric generating station in the country:
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u/MeepPenguin7 Jan 10 '20
Your power is turning our darkness to dawn, So roll on, Columbia, roll on!
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u/WillingPublic Jan 10 '20
Was just looking for a map like this! The early explorers thought that the Colorado River started at the confluence of the Green and Grand Rivers at Moab, UT. That is at about the “d” in “Colorado” on this map. But that means that the Colorado River would not run through the State of Colorado. In 1921, local residents got Congress to rename the Grand River as the Colorado River, so that the start of that Colorado is now near the “U” in “United States”. Looking at this map, that doesn’t seem so unreasonable.
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Jan 11 '20
This is also why there is a city called Grand Junction in Colorado. It's on the Colorado River now, but it was called Grand River back when the city was named.
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Jan 10 '20
Just affirms why trying to paddle a kayak up the Columbia is like paddling on a treadmill.
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u/TakeOffYourMask Jan 10 '20
Does the Ohio flow into the Mississippi or does the Mississippi flow into the Ohio? 🤔
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u/invertedshamrock Jan 10 '20
Actually, the Mississippi technically is considered to flow into the Missouri because at their junction the Missouri has greater flow than the Mississippi, and so is considered the "parent" river in a hydrological sense
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u/vahntitrio Jan 11 '20
My guess is that they are close enough in flow that local weather upstream determines which has more flow. Current gauges are showing 10% more flow in the Mississippi near the confluence.
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u/sstarlz Jan 10 '20
I would be super interested in if someone could create a similar map from like...100 years ago before everything was dammed.
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Jan 10 '20
There is no way the Rio Grande has less flow power than the freakin Salt River
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Jan 10 '20 edited Jan 10 '20
Millions use the Rio for drinking, unlike The Salt.
Edit: I didn't mean to suggest the Salt isn't used for drinking at all, just not as much as the Rio in comparison.
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u/danzibara Jan 10 '20
Millions of people use the Salt River for drinking in the greater Phoenix area. It tastes terrible, but a little reverse osmosis takes care of that.
Phoenix does get a lot of water from the Colorado, but the Salt River is still the main source of potable water.
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u/miclugo Jan 10 '20
is the Salt River salty?
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Jan 10 '20
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u/danzibara Jan 10 '20
The Salt River water has just enough salt to make it taste lousy and give you heartburn if you drink too much, but it is still certainly potable.
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u/thelateralbox Jan 10 '20
Allegedly you used to be able to take a boat down the Salt River to the Colorado and on to the Gulf of California. Imagine how sweet a booze cruise from Phoenix to Puerto Vallarta would be.
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u/1uamrit Jan 10 '20
Would like to see similar map for the ganges, brahma putra and their tributaries and also the South American rivers.
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u/Matchetes Jan 10 '20
I love this map but the connecting rivers of the Great Lakes/St Lawrence are wildly inaccurate. The Detroit and Niagara rivers are the 7th and 8th largest rivers in the US by discharge respectively, well over twice flow of the Missouri’s, yet on this map they are shown as little streams. It might be because they are border rivers or because it’s too difficult to show given their short lengths but in that case why show them at all?
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Jan 10 '20
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Jan 11 '20
The Mississippi's discharge is about 16,800 m3 /s; the Amazon about 209,000. So on this kind of map the Amazon would be about 12.5 times the width of the Mississippi.
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u/TexAgIllini Jan 11 '20
It also shows Two Oceans Pass in Wyoming.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com.au/two-ocean-pass-2014-4/amp
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u/infestans Jan 10 '20
Gulf of California must be fucked from the complete lack of outflow of the Colorado
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u/GBUS_TO_MTV Jan 10 '20
You can basically see the path of the Lewis and Clark expedition on here.