Drainage Divide - Types

Types

Drainage divides can be grouped in three types:

  • Continental divide
A divide in which waters on each side flow to different oceans (for example: the Nile and Congo)
  • Major drainage divide
Waters on each side of the divide never meet, but do flow into the same ocean (for example: the divide between the Yellow River basin and the Yangtze)
  • Minor drainage divide
Waters part, but eventually rejoin at a river confluence (for example: the Mississippi and Missouri divides)

Drainage divides hinder river navigation. In pre-industrial times, water divides were crossed at portages. Later, canals connected adjoining drainage basins.

Read more about this topic:  Drainage Divide

Famous quotes containing the word types:

    He’s one of those know-it-all types that, if you flatter the wig off him, he chatter like a goony bird at mating time.
    —Michael Blankfort. Lewis Milestone. Johnson (Reginald Gardner)

    The bourgeoisie loves so-called “positive” types and novels with happy endings since they lull one into thinking that it is fine to simultaneously acquire capital and maintain one’s innocence, to be a beast and still be happy.
    Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)

    ... there are two types of happiness and I have chosen that of the murderers. For I am happy. There was a time when I thought I had reached the limit of distress. Beyond that limit, there is a sterile and magnificent happiness.
    Albert Camus (1913–1960)