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How long is a river?

June 17th, 2007 by

The Amazon is now being declared the world’s longest river, besting the Nile by a mere 125km. It all comes down to defining what constitutes a river’s beginning and end, and then identifying the beginnings and ends of the particular rivers.

Facts are sometimes a little more miscellaneous than we’d like. (Thanks to Henok Mehari for the link.)

2 Comments »

2 Responses to “How long is a river?”

  1. on 17 Jun 2007 at 11:28 pm1 Brian H

    Sure; it’s always seemed obvious to me that in the extreme you could track the furthest trickle off a leaf somewhere and claim that was the “start” or source of a river. Only big distances or differences can be agreed on in this particular kind of measurement. There’s a quibbling (scale-) threshold, beyond which only argumentative nit-pickers need venture.

  2. on 18 Jun 2007 at 8:55 pm2 How long is a river? » jeppe kabell

    […] How long is a river? […]