Now rivers are not limited to boring textbooks and geography classes only, here’s a compact list of facts that will answer any queries that you might have about rivers, or if you’re studying for a general knowledge test , then you have come to the right place. Learn about rivers in interesting new ways from our amazing fact sheet:
Defining a river in terms of its volume and length is a difficult task indeed, and sometimes if a number of tributaries merge to form it, it is impossible to determine the point of origination of that river. In this article the length of a river is taken to be the distance between the point of outflow and the location of the original headwaters.
1. For the United States the longest river is the Missouri river running a distance of 2540 miles and Mississippi runs a close second with 2340 miles on it.
2.The shortest river in the list of Unites States longest rivers is the Milk which is only 625 miles long.
3.Statistics for the world make the World’s longest river to be the Nile in Egypt running a total length of 4132 miles, with the Amazon being a close contender at 4087 miles.
4.In terms volume Amazon turns out to be the biggest river in the world and has an average flow rate of 209,000 m3/s. It is so big in fact that it has been said to hold the combined capacity of the Ganges, Congo, Orinoco, Yangtze and Madeira.
5.For the United Kingdom the longest river is the River Severn which has a running length of 354 km.
6.There is a huge range of water sports that can be enjoyed in rivers including water skiing, swimming, canoeing, and water rafting and of course fishing.
7.The Amazon is also the proud owner of the world’s largest drainage basin which covers an area of 6144,000 square kilometers of land. The second largest drainage basin belongs to the Rio de le Plate in South Africa with a drainage area of 4144,000 square kilometers.
8.Rivers having more than one channel are known as braided rivers.
9.Tokyo holds the biggest river festival in the world called the Sumida firework river festival. This festival has now become a tradition which dates back as far as the 19th century and almost 1000,000 people fly in from all over the world to attend this festival
10.The Imjin River located in South Korea has been named the ‘River of the dead’ owing to the large number of North Korean dead bodies which floated down the river during times of war
11.Brazilian scientist made an astonishing discovery in 2011, when they uncovered another River which runs beneath the Amazon. River Hamza, named after the leading professor of the team responsible for this discovery, runs the same length as the Amazon which is 6000 km, but maybe up to hundreds of times as wider.
12.Everybody has one passion or another, for Martin Stel, his biggest passion seems to be swimming. This Slovenian man has swum the entire lengths of the Mississippi River in the U.S, The Danube in Europe, The Yangtze in China and even the Amazon (reported to be one of the longest rivers in the world).
13.Well diamonds certainly maybe forever, but their first discovery was certainly not made by mining but were actually found in the alluvial deposits of a river in South India in 9th century B.C.
14.3/4ths of this Earth might be water, but around 17 countries in the world with Saudi Arabia on the list do not have a single river.
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