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:

    Science is intimately integrated with the whole social structure and cultural tradition. They mutually support one other—only in certain types of society can science flourish, and conversely without a continuous and healthy development and application of science such a society cannot function properly.
    Talcott Parsons (1902–1979)

    The American man is a very simple and cheap mechanism. The American woman I find a complicated and expensive one. Contrasts of feminine types are possible. I am not absolutely sure that there is more than one American man.
    Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)

    Our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types who wave around Sixties banners to conceal their record of ruthless, beaverlike tunneling to the top.
    Camille Paglia (b. 1947)