River flow volumes, as visualized by some guys at Pacific Institute, who explain:
Major rivers of the 48 contiguous United States, scaled by average flow where river symbols are proportional to the “gage-adjusted flow.” The symbols drawn here have widths proportional to the square root of the rivers’ estimated average annual discharge. Only rivers with discharge above 1,000 cfs are shown. Data from NHDPlus v2. Background map by ESRI.
idk what the Pacific Northwest river is called. probably either Washington or Vancouver though?
snake - colombia? idk, PNW people are big blood and soil ppl. how come i never hear them talk about these rivers. sounds fake.
Yeah, that’s the Columbia, drains snowmelt from the Rockies.
huh didn’t know it had that much flow
altho I guess what makes the mississippi so valuable is not that it has a lot of water but that it has a huge navigable network, which is correlated but not the same. the columbia is apparently navigable all the way to idaho which is further than I might have expected. seems like a solid regional waterway
It’s only been navigable (by barge) to Idaho since 1975, part of the psychosocial stuff around it was a lot of the damming (which rendered it smoothly navigable and controlled flooding but also interrupted mighty salmon runs) didn’t happen until after the development of modern environmentalism