🏞️ Rivers of the World
The great rivers of the world, from the Nile and the Amazon to famous shorter rivers such as the Rhine, Thames, Seine and Hudson, listed from longest to shortest. For each one: where it starts, where it ends, the countries it crosses, a photo, and the live weather and five-year weather history for the major cities along its banks. Rivers that end by joining another river can be traced all the way to the sea.
Lengths are commonly cited approximations. Sources differ by hundreds of kilometres depending on where a river is said to start and how it is measured, so the order is approximate; a few entries are river systems (for example Mississippi–Missouri and Ob–Irtysh). Photos: Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. River lines: Natural Earth (public domain), simplified. Weather and history: Open-Meteo, five-year averages.
🗺️ River Map Tap a river for its course, cities and mouth
River colour shows where the water finally ends up. Imagery: Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics. River lines are simplified and show the main named channel only; a few rivers without a line show an approximate dashed path through their cities.
🌊 How Rivers Run
Every river is water moving downhill. It collects rain, melting snow and groundwater from the land around it, gathers into streams, and follows the lowest route it can find to a lake, a sea or the ocean.
Where these rivers end
🔺 Deltas
A delta forms where a river reaches still water, such as a sea or lake. The current slows, the river can no longer carry its load of sand and mud, and it drops the sediment, building new land that spreads into the water. The river splits into many branches called distributaries.
Rivers in this list that end in a delta
🧂 Where Fresh Water Meets Salt Water
The place where a river meets the sea is called an estuary. Fresh water and salt water do not simply blend: salt water is denser, so the two push and slide past each other, shaped by the river's flow and the tide.
🗺️ Watersheds
A watershed (also called a drainage basin or catchment) is all the land that drains to one river and out through one outlet. Rain or snow that lands anywhere inside it will, over time, head toward the same river. The ridge line around the edge is the divide: raindrops landing on one side go one way and raindrops on the other side go another.
How a watershed works
- It is a catchment. Every point of land belongs to exactly one watershed at each scale.
- They nest. A creek's watershed sits inside a river's, which sits inside a bigger basin that drains to the ocean.
- The divide decides. A raindrop that lands a few metres either side of a ridge can end up in oceans thousands of kilometres apart.
- What happens upstream travels downstream. Fertiliser, sediment and pollution on the land are carried by the water, and so are the benefits of clean headwaters and healthy wetlands.
- Not all basins reach the sea. Roughly a fifth of the land drains to closed (endorheic) basins such as the Caspian Sea and the Great Basin, where water leaves only by evaporation.
Follow real raindrops from the mountains to the sea in Raindrop Journeys.
The largest river basins (approximate)
| River | Basin area | Drains to |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon | about 6–7 million km² | Atlantic Ocean |
| Congo | about 3.7 million km² | Atlantic Ocean |
| Nile | about 3.3 million km² | Mediterranean Sea |
| Mississippi–Missouri | about 3.2 million km² | Gulf of Mexico |
| Ob–Irtysh | about 3 million km² | Arctic Ocean (Kara Sea) |
| Paraná–La Plata | about 2.6 million km² | Atlantic Ocean |
| Yenisei | about 2.5 million km² | Arctic Ocean (Kara Sea) |
| Lena | about 2.5 million km² | Arctic Ocean (Laptev Sea) |
Basin areas vary by source and by what is counted; treat them as rounded estimates.
💧 Raindrop Journeys Follow the water from a point to the sea
Choose a journey to see the path a drop of water takes through a watershed. The route is drawn on the map above and explained step by step.