How to get your rivers in the right place

[Notsonoble]

You know, some of this makes no since when looking at a texas map... our rivers split like crazy...

[Redrobes]

Been scanning with google and see lots of rivers and tribs but no violations so far. Where you looking ? Can you post a map link ?

There are places in flood plains where it goes all over the place but thats expected in a flood plain only cos its changing so fast. Put some gradient on it and it settles into the standard patterns quickly.

[pickaboo]

Long time, no post..
I was recently in a conference about heat and mass transfer and this river issue came up. Professor Voller (http://www.ce.umn.edu/~voller/) from University of Minnesota and his group are modeling the generation of river deltas and they've shown that significant delta formation can be observed in scale of decades. They use this information in attempt to protect cities from hurricanes there.
This makes me think that we really should sort of use blur on the deltas instead of high-detailed islets and such.

[arxhon]

Maybe late to the party on the "lakes districts" of Northern Canada (not just Ontario), but here's some additional information:

The crazy number of lakes stretching across northern Canada down to about the 52nd parallel or so is, in fact, due to glaciation, as alluded to in earlier posts. Long story short, the glaciers gouged up the ground beneath them as they advanced (glaciers flow like water, just very slowly), and then deposited ice behind them as they retreated.

The gouges are where lakes formed. The largest and best known glacial lakes are the Great Lakes, of course. Lakes of similar size are Great Slave Lake, Lake Winnipeg and Great Bear Lake.

Glaciers often left behind what is called "knob and kettle" terrain (c.f. eastern Alberta around Cold Lake) as they melted and retreated, which is extremely hilly with small lakes between and around the hills. Interestingly enough, swampy areas are not infrequent due to very shallow lakes being silted up and slowly overgrown with peat mosses, deciduous trees, shallow water plants, and so on (c.f. Elk Island National Park).

Hopefully this has provided enough information for others to do more specific research on their own or as springboards for mapping ideas.

[RobA]

More interesting stuff. I came across this image at Wikipedia (image has been released to public domain):



This shows all the continental divides in the world. Of note are the grey areas. These represent endorheic basins that do not drain to the ocean (link):

An endorheic basin ... is a closed drainage basin that retains water and allows no outflow to other bodies of water such as rivers or oceans. [I]n an endorheic basin, rain (or other precipitation) that falls within it does not flow out but may only leave the drainage system by evaporation and seepage...

Endorheic regions ... are closed hydrologic systems. Their surface waters drain to inland terminal locations where the water evaporates or seeps into the ground, having no access to discharge into the sea... Endorheic water bodies include some of the largest lakes in the world, such as the Aral Sea and the Caspian Sea...[3]

I was stunned at the area these comprise! The river police might need to go back to school

-Rob A>

[Ascension]

Interesting. I'd like to see rivers superimposed on top to see how that comes out.