Related topics: water · climate change

China's bid to decarbonize may have hidden costs

Environmentalists rejoiced when China announced its commitment to reach carbon neutrality by 2060, but the decarbonization of China—which emits 27% of global carbon dioxide and a third of the world's greenhouse gases—may ...

Study provides new global accounting of Earth's rivers

A study led by NASA researchers provides new estimates of how much water courses through Earth's rivers, the rates at which it's flowing into the ocean, and how much both of those figures have fluctuated over time—crucial ...

Managing meandering waterways in a changing world

Just as water moves through a river, rivers themselves move across the landscape. They carve valleys and canyons, create floodplains and deltas, and transport sediment from the uplands to the ocean.

River

A river is a natural watercourse, usually freshwater, flowing toward an ocean, a lake, a sea or another river. In a few cases, a river simply flows into the ground or dries up completely before reaching another body of water. Small rivers may also be called by several other names, including stream, creek, brook, rivulet, and rill; there is no general rule that defines what can be called a river. Many names for small rivers are specific to geographic location; one example is Burn in Scotland and North-east England. Sometimes a river is said to be larger than a creek, but this is not always the case, due to vagueness in the language.

A river is part of the hydrological cycle. Water within a river is generally collected from precipitation through surface runoff, groundwater recharge, springs, and the release of stored water in natural ice and snowpacks (i.e., from glaciers).

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