Let’s learn about rivers

What has a furniture but doesn’t sleep, a rima but doesn’t speak, and a slope but nary money? A river!

Rivers are big, earthy flows of h2o that snake crossed each continent. They alteration wide successful size and terrain but stock a fewer basal features.

A stream starts with water. That archetypal root mightiness beryllium a water oregon meltwater from snowfall oregon ice. As that h2o flows downhill, precipitation and groundwater adhd to it. Small streams and creeks merge to signifier rivers. Rivers tin merge to signifier bigger rivers. Eventually, the stream empties into different assemblage of water, specified arsenic a water oregon ocean. The extremity of a stream is called its mouth.

Rivers person immense powerfulness to signifier the lands they cross. Millions of years of erosion by h2o from the Colorado River, for instance, sculpted the Grand Canyon. Rivers tin besides abruptly divided oregon reroute to signifier caller landscapes. This speedy alteration successful way is known arsenic avulsion. Where a stream meets a water oregon ocean, the h2o tin dump sediment to signifier caller onshore called a delta.

Healthy rivers are important for galore reasons. Rivers enactment aquatic life. That includes invertebrates, fish, plants and much — which tin beryllium recovered passim a river, from the water’s aboveground to its bottom, oregon bed. A river’s h2o supports plants, animals and different beingness forms on its banks. People usage stream h2o to drink, h2o crops, transport goods and nutrient energy done hydroelectric dams.

But quality enactment is besides harming the world’s rivers.

Runoff from farmland carries pesticides and different pollutants into rivers. Medicines and different chemicals successful our wastewater taint rivers arsenic well. Human-caused clime alteration is warming stream waters, stressing species that unrecorded there. Dams and groundwater pumping interrupt the travel of water done rivers, damaging their ecosystems. And sometimes radical usage truthful overmuch stream h2o that rivers adust up earlier reaching their mouth.

World Rivers Day — connected the 4th Sunday of each September — aims to rise consciousness astir these threats. Scientists are searching for ways to enactment and reconstruct these ecosystems. Taking down poorly placed dams and pumping chilly waters into overheated rivers tin help. Devising new ways to propulsion retired trash and different contamination are important too.

This World Rivers Day, cheque retired the tools successful our Activities conception beneath to get to cognize the rivers adjacent you. What could you bash to assistance your section rivers thrive? 

Want to cognize more? We’ve got immoderate stories to get you started:

Freshwater food are successful trouble: Here’s however we tin assistance them Human enactment tin person a immense interaction connected rivers and different caller waterways — for bully and for bad.  (5/22/2025) Readability: 6.9

Pumping acold h2o into rivers could assistance food chill out Human-made acold h2o plumes could assistance food bushed the vigor arsenic clime alteration warms rivers. (12/4/2023) Readability: 6.7

Bubbles could assistance region trash from rivers An airy curtain of them would divert trash to an onshore postulation system. (5/12/2022) Readability: 7.5