Page 10 - Water Every Drop Counts

THE WORLD OF RIVERS

The most international
Carver of the grand river system, the Danube
canyon, the Colorado and its tributaries are
is one of the world’s used by more than 80
most managed riv- million people in 20
ers. Its main stream European countries.
and tributaries are Winding east from
dammed and diverted Germany to the Black
for use by seven U.S. The Mississippi River and Sea, it is the continent’s
states and Mexico, its longest tributary, the second longest river, after
leaving its mouth dry Missouri, form one river Russia’s Volga.
in most years system, draining 31 U.S.
states and two Canadian
provinces. The connected
waters of the Great Lakes
flow east to form the St.
Lawrence River

No river carries more water
than the Amazon. In a 6679 km
journey from the Andes to the
Atlantic, it drains an area nearly
the size of Australia, with an
average daily discharge of
17,03,435 crore liters–some
15 percent of all the water that
rivers send to the sea.
Rivers have held the keys to the development
of civilizations and are known as the “cradle of
civilizations”. The Indus was the backbone for the Indus
Valley Civilization spread across the Punjab valley and
Sindh in India. The ancient civilizations of Mohenjo-
daro and Harappa flourished on the banks of the Indus
River. Mesopotamia (Greek for the land between the
rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates) was the home of
several important ancient empires. Chinese civilization
was located principally in the Yellow and Yangzi river
basins. Egypt is in fact known as the “Gift of the Nile”
due to the fact that Egypt would have been overtaken
by the Sahara desert had it not been for the silt and
alluvium the Nile brings.

Rivers provided these early civilizations with drinking
water; water for irrigating fields and for bathing,
cleaning and construction purposes. Rivers hold only The Parana River drives
about 0.006 percent of total freshwater reserves, yet, one of the world’s largest
few lands are untouched by the power of a stream. hydroelectric plants, the
Rivers create their own channels, gathering rain or Itaipu Dam, on the Brazil-
Paraguay border. Beyond
snow and ice melt that runs off the land and bearing it the dam, the tributary
downhill by force of gravity. The journey makes rivers Iguacu River enters with
the unsurpassed carvers of Earth, cutting canyons and its famed waterfalls, all
before the Parana picks
valleys and depositing sediments as fertile soils. Rivers up its major tributary, the
and lakes store less than half a percent of Earth’s fresh Paraguay.
water, but they are the lifelines of human history where
people settled, farmed, traded, built cities, explored.

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