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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

The "rivers never split" rule is BS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_bifurcation

I'm pretty sure the image is satire that happens to provide a semi-workable description of how watersheds work.

Did you actually read it? Everything in it is wrong.

The only instances I know of rivers naturally splitting is in river deltas. These form from sediment accumulating at what was once a single river mouth. The islands in a delta have consistent properties: they are flat, consist of soil and silt rather than rock, and are usually marshy.

Anything that deviates from these rules is usually wrong. Rivers don't split around two sides of a mountain, for example.

Yeah, that's a weird thing to be wrong about. There's an abundance of cities built on where multiple rivers meet.

That's two rivers merging, not splitting.

Not in terms of the "guide" linked to. It looks at rivers as something creeping up from the ocean to higher lands. It's a perspective where a river travels upstream, even if it flows downstream, if that makes sense.

The author is saying two streams travelling up never split, only merge. I'm saying they do split [0]. An upstream split is a downstream merge.

[0] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/45.7293/4.8128

Plenty cities are located where rivers meet, however I'm struggling to think of any where a major river splits?

Staten Island could be seen as between two ends of the Hudson.

Alexandria and Cairo are at the Nile delta.

The Mississippi River merges/splits with the Red River/Atchafalaya River at the Old River Control Structure.

The Orinoco River and Rio Negro are connected via a distributary, although this is the upper reaches of both rivers.

Deltas are commonly very large and involve several streams. The mouth of the Amazon River is more or less 100 miles distant. And the Brahamaputra and Ganges river delta involves 100s of channels that more or less crisscoss the entirety of Bangladesh.

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