The worst river violations ever...

[LS-Jebus]

Sometimes people call the river police when they don't need to.

I'm not saying the example on the first page isn't a crime, or else a very unique place that needs a bit of explaining.

If I have an area just full of lakes everywhere and no rivers, people would go crazy. But its not a violation at all. In the Canadian Shield area, that's what I see all the time. Small lakes that don't drain anywhere, and don't even have a discernible river to support it - the water either goes directly from the surface to the lake, or it is fueled by groundwater coming from higher terrain. So many rivers are below the ground.

Then there's rivers that split - depending on the situation, it may or may not make sense. We all know about deltas, but in areas where the bedrock is exposed with a thin layer of soil, a large "island" of rock can divide a river in two before it drains into a sea or large lake. Normally, the river would eventually find one path easier, and the other would slowly cease to flow. But in areas full of lakes and rivers fueled by immense storages of groundwater or mountain glaciers, the split river continues to flow for a long time.

I've made landscapes where two oceans are joined by a thin stretch of water, but I ensure that it is large enough to be obviously a channel, and not a river.

I've never had a situation with crazy rivers joining up and splitting constantly on a wide scale, but its another time when most people would needlessly call foul. "Anastomosis" seems the right word. A good example is in the northern territories of Canada - lowlands with more water than the population of China would need, flowing through an insane network of rivers and swamps.

There really needs to be a detailed height map to analyze before one can fully justify the report to the river police.

Rivers are very complex, and you could easily write a large book in several volumes to cover all the different possibilities with explanations and examples.

[NeonKnight]

True. True. Most of the times we call the River Police is when we see not so much tons of lakes with no ingress or egress, but when we see rivers join split, etc, or lakes drain vi more than one outlet. Things that normally just don't do that.

Of, course, things being as they are, we can point to MANY things in the real world that just breaks the rules. The Dead Sea for example being a body of water that does not drain to the sea/ocean. The Nile River Delta, being an hundred+ miles of splitting river as it flows to the sea, etc.

[vernontwinkie]

We should require these so-called artists to do an internship here. Interesting concept, too bad the natural laws of geology prohibit something like this from ever actually happening. I'm with ya GP, I'd do the same thing. I might even go so far as to make a nice big cartouche and fancy title with the original artist's name on it instead of mine...or yours in this case, you know what I mean

Where can I sign up to be an intern? I'd love the chance to have exercises assigned to me so I can draw maps effectively!