Great Rivers

Anatomy of a river

Rivers are the lifelines of our civilizations. A river usually stars from a glacier atop a mountain. Many streams join together to make a river. Smaller rivers, called Tributaries, join the main river. The sides of a river are called River banks. A river Bed is the soil under the river. Drainage Basin is the area whose rain water is collected by the river. A good way to understand what a drainage basin is to think of the area as a shallow dish, or saucer. Whenever rain falls and lands anywhere in the river basin it all runs into the lowest place in the pan, which is the river. Floodplains are the plains around the river which are flooded during rainy seasons.

Rivers usually meet the sea, at a place called the Mouth. They deposit huge amounts of eroded soils there, forming Deltas. Erosion also creates River gorges and canyons.

Great River – The Amazon.
Amazon is the greatest river in the world by a number of measures. It carries the largest amount of water – At places it is so wide that it is called the River Sea, The Amazon is the second longest river in the world. It begins as hundreds of tiny little streams high in the Andes Mountains. It is joined by over two hundred tributaries which flow into the main river. The Amazon carries more water than any of the world's rivers. Each second, between 34 and 121 million litres of water are carried into the Atlantic Ocean. This is because rain falls on more than 200 days every year.
Amazon is so big because it is situated right on the equator, where it rains almost every day. Its’ drainage basin covers the entire northern half of the continent of South America. On its course to the sea, the Amazon flows through the biggest rainforest in the world. More then a third of all species in the world live in the Amazon. It is home to a great number of Parrots, toucans, jaguars, monkeys, fish, snakes and insects.
Boto – or the River Dolphin, the deadly Piranha and the huge Anaconda all share Amazon as their home.

Our Great River- the Ganges.
The Ganges is the main river system in India. Its source is found 3000 metres high in the Himalayas, the world's highest mountains. The Ganges gets its water from the snow melting in the spring and summer months. The course of the Ganges takes it across northern India before it finally reaches its mouth in the Bay of Bengal. The mouth of the Ganges is a delta (it is the World's largest delta).
The Ganges has two main tributaries: the Jumna and the Brahmaputra. The Jumna is 1358 kilometres in length and joins the Ganges at the city of Allahabad. The Brahmaputra is 2900 kilometres long and joins the Ganges in its delta.