Source: Water resources search
The rivers join downstream, downhill and end up meeting an ocean or terminal lake: these are fundamental rules on how the sailors and basins are supposed to work. But the rules are established to be infringed. Sowby and Siegel Arrange nine rivers and lakes in the Americas that defy hydrological expectations.
All the exhibition bodies of bifurcationin which a river is divided into branches which continue downstream. But unlike typical bifurcations, these examples do not return to the main navigable path after branching.
The Casiquiare river of South America, for example, is a navigable navigable track which links the two largest watersheds on the continent, the Orino and Amazon basins, by acting as distributionary of the old and an tributary of the latter. It is “the hydrological equivalent of a green hole between two galaxies”, write the authors. Casiquiare is divided from the Orinoco river and winds through lush tropical forests and almost flat to reach the Rio Negro and, finally, the Amazon River. The authors of the study point out that the slight slope (less than 0.009%) is sufficient to send large volumes of water to the river and that this unusual body results from an incomplete river capture. They note that understanding Casiquiare is always evolving.
The Dutch colonists first mapped the Wayambo river distant to Suriname in 1717. This river can flow to the east or west, depending on the precipitation and the human changes of the flow using locks. It is also near the extraction of gold and bauxite as well as oil production sites, and its two -way speed makes it difficult to spread the propagation of pollutants.
Of all the rivers they have examined, the researchers described the Echimamish river, above in the Canadian desert, like the “most confusing”. Its name means “the water flowing in both directions” in Cree. The river connects the Hayes river and the Nelson river, and by certain accounts, the Echimamish flows outwards from its middle towards the two largest rivers. However, its course is flat and punctuated by beaver dams, leading to uncertainty, even today, on the direction of its flow and exactly where the management moves.
The authors have also explored six other strange navigable channels, including lakes with two sockets and streams that flow from both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In doing so, they stressed how much there is to know how the waters of our world work. (Water resources search,, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024WR0398242025)
—Reccca Dzombak, scientific writer