Question

Your book does not point it out, but most of the really great rivers of the world have their beginning in mountains. Where do the mountains get enough water to give birth to great rivers??

Answer 1

Most rivers begin life as a tiny stream running down a mountain slope. They are fed by rainwater (while cloud obstruct to a mountains , mountains have a cooler temperature due to there height and they forms rain ) running off the land ( if not by melting snow and ice). The water follows cracks and folds in the land as it flows downhill. Small streams meet and join together, growing larger and larger until the flow can be called a river. On its way down, the water shapes the landscape by wearing away rock and carving out a network of valleys. Reaching lower ground, the river widens and takes a winding route. Eventually, most rivers empty out into the sea.

We can see such kind of river /water falls in Western Ghats in India .

The heavy seasonal rainfall from the South West Monsoon has sustained a large number of rivers flowing either to the east or to the west of the Western Ghats range which is the main watershed of the peninsular India.

The Western Ghats are remarkable for being the headwaters of all the major and many smaller rivers of the peninsula. The principal rivers originate and flow eastward, journeying across the peninsula for hundreds of kilometers to pour their waters finally into the Bay of Bengal. On the western face of the Sahyadri scarp, numerous indentations have been made by a large number of short, perennial, torrential west flowing rivers which traverse the short distance through the narrow west coastal plains before discharging into the Arabian Sea through narrow inlets and creeks. Several of these streams form remarkable waterfalls.

The duration of the wet season varies from about three months in the north to over nine months in the south. The rainfall ranges from 2,000 to 7,500 mm per annum in some places on the western, windward side but rapidly decreases on the eastern.

The three major rivers that originate in the Western Ghats and flow to the east and traverse a great distances right across the peninsula are:-

1. The Godavari

2. The Krishna

3. The Kaveri

They are all mature, that is, they are so ancient that they have reached the base level of their erosion. Their valleys are wide and shallow, and they flow through flatlying alluvial tracts through which they meander at a sluggish rate, or through uplands and plateaus where their velocities are greater and into which they occasionally cut narrow defiles and gorges.