The River that doesn't meet sea. Is there a river that doesn't meet sea?

NEGI RK Sunday, January 24, 2021

The River that doesn't meet sea. Is there a river that doesn't meet sea?

In Utah USA, the Bear River, the Weber River, and the Jordan River all flow to the Great Salt Lake.

There are several, in fact! The most famous example would be the Okavango River, which - instead of reaching the ocean - peters out into the massive Okavango Delta and evaporates, in the middle of the Kalahari Desert. The Saharan megalakes are the most famous, but there are many equally fascinating ones which people forget about - namely Lake Makgadikgadi where the Okavango is today, which was possibly 3/4 the size of the Caspian, and the Caspian-Aral Sea, a bloated version of today’s Caspian Sea which was around 3 times larger and merged with the Aral Sea. I find massive paleolakes, in general, to be really interesting.

Contrast your USA river-basins map with this one of Australia, where many of our rivers flow into the deserts to either evaporate, or go underground, where they can be exploited through artesian wells. The Hudson River in NY is really a fjord; an arm of the ocean and therefore salty. When the Twin Towers were designed, they used an AC system that took in water and then expelled it in a slightly warmer state. The problem was that the term “Hudson River” mislead them into thinking it contained fresh “river water”. Which is did not. They discovered their error when the pipes started to leak. All of the pipes had to be replaced with pipes that could handle salt water without corroding.

Also in NY, the East River is really a Tidal Estuary connecting Long Island Sound with The Upper Bay. The Harlem River is really a tidal strait connecting the Hudson River with the East River.

In the southeast, there's a massive blank spot (Europe's largest ice sheet), and then there's the chaos of the Northwest. Some other notable instances include the Onyx River - the longest river in Antarctica, at 32 kilometres in length - which simply flows from one lake to another, Of course watersheds which don’t flow to the sea (or ocean) almost unavoidably feed an underground water table. Some might evaporate completely away, although I doubt that really happens to any large river.

This comment humbly submitted by someone who has actually had a college course in hydrology. We have a beauty in Australia, called the Lake Eyre. It is a salt lake which fills only once a Decade or so though various, usually dry, rivers flowing from the monsoonal North of the Continent, or if there is a suitable cyclone in those Northern parts. One of the water suppliers, the Cooper's Creek, normally a trickle , can flood out to over 200 km in width. I flew over it a few times on the way to work and it IS awesome. Normally, that lake is none dry but after the water running in, it is full of bird life, wheels shrimps, fish and whatever else can be found there, around that briny water. Even the boats are available, sitting there for years, waiting for the runoff. And, it is a tourist magnet, too.

Notice how this map of aquifers provided by the USGS seems to mirror some of the patterns from the map provided in the very well written answer. You will see that the patterns match if you look.

And the Omo River, which starts in the Ethiopian Highlands and ends in Lake Turkana, Kenya.

But these last two flow into lakes. That’s not unusual for a river, right?

Certainly not; however, in the vast majority of cases, the river’s water will meet the sea eventually, as almost all lakes are drained by other rivers which reach the ocean. Not so for these lakes. Why? Because they’re in what are known as endorheic basins.

In hydrology, a basin is a region in which all precipitation will drain and collect into a common outlet. There are innumerable river basins throughout the world, with dozens in the (contiguous) US alone:

If you look closely at the map, you might notice that not all these river basins enter the sea. They are endorheic basins; closed, self-contained systems where the amount of water flowing in is equal to the amount which evaporates or seeps away.

You can theoretically find them in any climate, but they tend to be in very dry areas - e.g. the Kalahari - as where it’s rainier erosion will usually carve pathways to the ocean. They also often have mountains or glaciers blocking their way to the sea.

As you can see in the map above, endorheic basins (shaded light blue) make up about 18 per cent of the world’s land area - although this map doesn’t show the ones in Antarctica.

Also note that 6 of the world’s 25 largest lakes are in endorheic basins - Lakes Turkana, Balkhash, Titicaca, Issyk-kul, and Urmia, and of course the Caspian Sea - the largest lake in all the world.