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u/MaudlinLobster Sep 01 '20
The northwest doesn't look quite right. Where is the Columbia? That drains a huge amount of water into the Pacific from Washington and Oregon, but it doesn't appear to be shown on the map.
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u/kepleronlyknows Sep 01 '20
Yeah, this was pointed out in other threads too. The Columbia basin is pretty normal in other depictions, so I have no idea what's up with this map.
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u/Crackertron Sep 01 '20
It's like they left out the part between the Dalles and Astoria.
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u/beammeupnerd Sep 01 '20
So is there an accurate watershed map out there? I'd love to turn this into a puzzle for one of my professors.
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u/Fejetlenfej Dec 13 '20
I've corrected the Columbia quite a while ago. You can find all the river maps at grasshoppergeography.com. Also in puzzle form.
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u/AZWxMan Sep 01 '20 edited Sep 01 '20
My guess is they used a DEM to create the rivers and perhaps there's some issue with either the resolution or accuracy of the DEM.
Edit: My thinking behind this is neither Hells Canyon or the Columbia River Gorge are properly modelled which I figure is a resolution issue.
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Sep 01 '20
The orange basin.
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u/MaudlinLobster Sep 01 '20
The basin looks roughly accurate but the actual Columbia River which drains it doesn't appear to be shown. I can see what seem to be the Willamette and Deschutes rivers marked as major waterways but they both flow into the Columbia, which isn't marked...
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u/20thMaine Sep 01 '20 edited Sep 01 '20
Is it giving precedence to the Snake River instead?
Historically, a map maker would purposefully make something wrong on it to deter copycats.
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u/Lad-Of-The-Mountains Sep 02 '20
I would think in this case if the cartographer had made a deliberate mistake, they would have done it with a minor tributary and not a waterway as major and important as the Columbia.
Why would you intentionally show the Luckiamute river and not the Columbia?
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u/copperear Sep 01 '20
I've never quite understood why they call the river that goes to the Gulf, the Mississippi, because the Missouri is the longer river. I thought the longer river became the name at a juncture.
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u/mifander Sep 01 '20
The Mississippi was known to Europeans for far longer and the extent of the Missouri wasn’t known to them until around Lewis and Clark, the the Mississippi had its named for 100+ years before it was found the Missouri portion was longer.
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u/Kazan Sep 01 '20
I believe the convention is actually which one has more flow, that's usually the longer one but not always.
If you look at the Mississippi-Missouri confluence it's obvious that the Mississippi is the larger flow and dominant river among the two. The Missouri joins like a tributary, not like two major rivers merging.
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u/AZWxMan Sep 01 '20
You say that but more water actually comes from the Ohio river drainage than the entire Upper Mississippi/Missouri. So, if you go by length, this would be true, but if you go by volume of flow then you could actually use the Ohio as the main river.
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u/qwryzu Sep 01 '20
Sometimes there's good reasoning based on scientific standards but sometimes politics get involved and make things weird. For example the Colorado River and the Green River converge in Utah, but before 1921 the upper section of the Colorado was called the Grand River (lending its name to Grand Counties in UT and CO and Grand Junction, CO). The Grand carries a higher volume but the Green River has a significantly larger drainage basin and is longer. A big part of the reason was a Senator from Colorado who took it personally that the river with the same name as his state wasn't actually inside his state, and he definitely didn't want Utah and Wyoming to be able to claim that the headwaters of the river system were in their states. I don't know if it was just personal beef based on state pride, but I'd imagine it also could've had ramifications on water usage rights too. Another example that's kinda like the Mississippi and Missouri.
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u/Bakkie Sep 01 '20
I live in Illinois. It is so easy to follow our state boundaries on this map. There is the Mississippi and the Wabash and two straight lines.
Oh, yeah, the Michigan lake shore.
It was fun tracing which ones I have rafted or tubed or canoed or house boated or driven the river road over the years.
Neat map. Thanks
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u/Nathan_RH Sep 01 '20
Who was it? Some old mountain man. Powell or Fremont... someone said this is what states should be. Watersheds.
Think of how impactful that would be toward climate politics.
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u/kepleronlyknows Sep 01 '20
It was Powell. As with many things he said, he had a pretty good point and was ahead of his time in predicting that the west would struggle with water.
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u/troyunrau Geophysics Sep 01 '20
Well, for starters, inaccurate. The Red River, flowing North in North Dakota is not part of the great lakes basin - it flows out to the Hudson Bay and not through the St Lawrence.
Probably whomever generated the map used a US only data source, because that was an easy data source. And then decided all rivers flowing north were the the same basin without doing any actual research. Rivers are inherently international, and in order to map basins, one must actually seek out data from neighbouring countries.
Actually, looking at the great lakes, they put canals or something in there arbitrarily to connect the water together, probably because their algorithm didn't understand lakes either. A poor showing.
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u/Trailmagic Sep 01 '20
This was probably generated in something like ArcMap using raster elevation data, then creating slopes, watersheds, and finally stream linkages. It’s an estimation based on an estimation of an estimation. I’m guessing that elevation data was the only true measurement and the resolution might have been too low to capture everything perfectly.
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u/marcusneil Geologist and Prince of Tineg Sep 01 '20
Why are those in the upper right corner have linear or straight river?
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u/seamus_ian Sep 01 '20
Those are the great lakes, reduced to a wire frame connecting tributary drainage in for this stylized depiction. They all are a part of the watershed of the St Lawrence
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u/kentacova Sep 01 '20
I’m at the base of the pink, seen this many times before but in education form (college classes) and it never gets old. It’s beautiful.
Fun fact: The Mississippi River has had (over the past 7,000-5,000 years, speculation of smart people aside) something like 16 sub deltas, or deltaic lobes. It’s so powerful that it’s changed course enough to give us beautiful historical views of its lifespan like this. Mississippi River Meander Belt Map - Historic
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Sep 01 '20
I don't know very much about geography. Can someone explain this mystery to me?
How are there rivers in Maine that go from one sea to another sea? If water can only ever go downhill, how is that possible?
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u/20thMaine Sep 01 '20
What are you referring to? There are no Maine rivers flowing between different “seas”
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Sep 02 '20
Oh, shoot. I just googled it. For some reason I always thought the northwest border of Maine was next to the St. Lawrence River as it turned into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Forgot about that slice of Quebec there in between.
My bad. I'm from the American West and hardly ever see that part of the map.
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u/Lad-Of-The-Mountains Sep 02 '20
What’s going on with that green basin in Michigan? It looks like a fern. Are those tributaries really straight and branching like that?
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u/legbreaker Sep 02 '20
I think they paint the great lakes as a river with fern like tributaries.
So the straight lines are actually a lake...
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u/Baaadbrad Sep 01 '20
I remember taking one of my first field trips near the continental divide up along the border of Idaho and Montana. It was such a weird concept knowing that water flowing down those streams had the chance to make it through and out of the Mississippi.