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:
“As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting—the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.”
—Saul Bellow (b. 1915)
“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)