River

Yellow River (Huang He)

Kananaskis River

river, (ultimately from Latin ripa, “bank”), any natural stream of water that flows in a channel with defined banks . Modern usage includes rivers that are multichanneled, intermittent, or ephemeral in flow and channels that are practically bankless. The concept of channeled surface flow, however, remains central to the definition. The word stream (derived ultimately from the Indo-European root srou-) emphasizes the fact of flow; as a noun, it is synonymous with river and is often preferred in technical writing. Small natural watercourses are sometimes called rivulets, but a variety of names—including branch, brook, burn, and creek—are more common, occurring regionally to nationally in place-names. Arroyo and (dry) wash connote ephemeral streams or their resultant channels. Tiny streams or channels are referred to as rills or runnels.

Rio Grande

Rivers are nourished by precipitation, by direct overland runoff, through springs and seepages, or from meltwater at the edges of snowfields and glaciers. The contribution of direct precipitation on the water surface is usually minute, except where much of a catchment area is occupied by lakes. River water losses result from seepage and percolation into shallow or deep aquifers (permeable rock layers that readily transmit water) and particularly from evaporation. The difference between the water input and loss sustains surface discharge or streamflow. The amount of water in river systems at any time is but a tiny fraction of the Earth’s total water; 97 percent of all water is contained in the oceans and about three-quarters of fresh water is stored as land ice; nearly all the remainder occurs as groundwater. Lakes hold less than 0.5 percent of all fresh water, soil moisture accounts for about 0.05 percent, and water in river channels for roughly half as much, 0.025 percent, which represents only about one four-thousandth of the Earth’s total fresh water.

Water is constantly cycled through the systems of land ice, soil, lakes, groundwater (in part), and river channels, however. The discharge of rivers to the oceans delivers to these systems the equivalent of the water vapour that is blown overland and then consequently precipitated as rain or snow—i.e., some 7 percent of mean annual precipitation on the globe and 30 percent of precipitation on land areas.

Rivers are 100 times more effective than coastal erosion in delivering rock debris to the sea. Their rate of sediment delivery is equivalent to an average lowering of the lands by 30 centimetres (12 inches) in 9,000 years, a rate that is sufficient to remove all the existing continental relief in 25,000,000 years.

Rock debris enters fluvial systems either as fragments eroded from rocky channels or in dissolved form. During transit downstream, the solid particles undergo systematic changes in size and shape, traveling as bed load or suspension load. Generally speaking, except in high latitudes and on steep coasts, little or no coarse bed load ever reaches the sea. Movement of the solid load down a river valley is irregular, both because the streamflow is irregular and because the transported material is liable to enter temporary storage, forming distinctive river-built features that range through riffles, midstream bars, point bars, floodplains, levees, alluvial fans, and river terraces. In one sense, such geomorphic features belong to the same series as deltas, estuary fills, and the terrestrial sediments of many inland basins.

Amazon River

Three Gorges Dam

Rates of erosion and transportation, and comparative amounts of solid and dissolved load, vary widely from river to river. Least is known about dissolved load, which at coastal outlets is added to oceanic salt. Its concentration in tropical rivers is not necessarily high, although very high discharges can move large amounts; the dissolved load of the lowermost Amazon averages about 40 parts per million, whereas the Elbe and the Rio Grande, by contrast, average more than 800 parts per million. Suspended load for the world in general perhaps equals two and one-half times dissolved load. Well over half of suspended load is deposited at river mouths as deltaic and estuarine sediment. About one-quarter of all suspended load is estimated to come down the Ganges-Brahmaputra and the Huang He (Yellow River), which together deliver some 4,500,000,000 tons a year; the Yangtze (Chang Jiang), Indus, Amazon, and Mississippi deliver quantities ranging from about 500,000,000 to approximately 350,000,000 tons a year. Suspended sediment transport on the Huang He equals a denudation rate of about 3,090 tons per square kilometre (8,000 tons per square mile) per year; the corresponding rate for the Ganges-Brahmaputra is almost half as great. Extraordinarily high rates have been recorded for some lesser rivers: for instance, 1,060 tons per square kilometre per year on the Jing and 1,080 tons per square kilometre per year on the Luo, both of which are Loess Plateau tributaries of the Huang He.

This article concentrates on the distribution, drainage patterns, and geometry of river systems; its coverage of the latter includes a discussion of channel patterns and such related features as waterfalls. Considerable attention is also given to fluvial landforms and to the processes involved in their formation. Additional information about the action of flowing water on Earth’s surface is provided in the article valley. Certain aspects of the changes in rivers through time are described in climate: Effects of precipitation, and the general interrelationship of river systems to other components of the Earth’s hydrosphere is treated in hydrosphere: River and ocean waters. For information concerning the plant and animal forms that inhabit the riverine environment, see inland water ecosystem.