The Mississippi River has the third largest drainage basin in the world, exceeded in size only by the watersheds of the Amazon and Congo Rivers. It drains 41 percent of the 48 contiguous states of the United States.
The basin covers more than 1,245,000 square miles, includes all or parts of 31 states and two Canadian provinces. The US Government has tried to improve navigability of the Mississippi River and its major tributaries for more than a hundred years, focused in part by
Mississippi River Commission, created in 1879. The river is ever-changing, and in an attempt to understand their domain, and
in 1941, MCR hired Harold Norman Fisk to conduct a geological investigation of the Lower Mississippi Valley. The result was
a colorful map that displayed the historical course of the riverway from southern Illinois to southern Louisana. His vivid maps are
available online in full, but beware:
the files are very large.
posted by filthy light thief
on Sep 30, 2011 -
24 comments
Right around 1879, the
fishwheel (
historical images,
McCord replica) came to the Columbia River. A clever application of mill-like thinking to traditional net fishing techniques, the fishwheel's river-powered automation of upstream harvesting revolutionized canning in Oregon and Washington, drawing both commercial attention and
critical concern [NYT 1881, PDF]. Two men, Thornton Williams and William Rankin McCord, each filed patents for fishwheel designs in 1881 (
#245251) and 1882 (
#257960) respectively; Williams brought an infringement suit against McCord which was
dismissed on the grounds that the invention was not new, being based directly on the publicly documented work of one Samuel Wilson in 1879. Fishwheels were fair game.
[more inside]
posted by cortex
on Jun 28, 2011 -
15 comments
Tama River Film: Tama River by Anders Edström & Karen Langley.
Music: Yoko Ono, Let’s Go On Flying.
Model: Ai Tominaga
posted by puny human
on Apr 11, 2011 -
8 comments
Want to avoid debt in grad school? You could follow the example of
this guy and live in a van.
posted by bove
on Dec 10, 2009 -
62 comments
For over a thousand years, fishermen all over the world have been using
cormorants to help them fish in lakes and rivers. In Gifu, Gifu Prefecture, Japan,
cormorant fishing on the
Nagara river has continued uninterrupted for the past 1,300 years. In
Guilin and
Yangshuo, China, cormorant birds are famous for fishing on the shallow
Lijiang River.
The islands of the Beaver Island archipelago in Northern Lake Michigan host what may be the densest concentration of the big, black diving birds on the continent, an estimated 50,000 that eat about 9 million pounds of fish from the surrounding waters from spring through fall. Fishermen and tourism interests want the state and federal governments to
cut the number of double-crested cormorants around the Beaver Island group by half, raising the ire of bird lovers and animal-rights activists who say the cormorants aren't at the root of the problem.
posted by mrducts
on Jul 1, 2008 -
13 comments
Ahmad Nadalian's work can be found all over the world. He is an artist that carves symbols on rocks and then leaves them at the site where they were created (sometimes
burying them).
posted by tellurian
on Aug 2, 2006 -
7 comments
Texas Riparian Law I found this intriguing because I 1) live in Texas, 2) have walked many Texas creekbottoms, 3) have a lot of lawyer friends, and 4) as an English major, find the language somehow beautiful.
posted by rleamon
on Jun 29, 2006 -
25 comments
FOVICKS - Friends Of Vast Industrial Concrete Kafkaesque Structures - a photo essay on the concrete geometries of the Los Angeles River flood control channels.
[via inhabitat]
posted by carter
on Mar 31, 2006 -
24 comments
A man and his rocket car. As documentaries enjoy an unprecedented level of popularity and financial success, it's high time that an obscure Canadian National Film Board
doc from 1981 was (re)discovered. The story of Ken Carter, who spends several years and millions of dollars of other people's money in the single-minded pursuit of one goal: jumping a jet-powered car across the St. Lawrence River from Canada to the United States. What is it with Canadians and
insane dreams?
posted by The Card Cheat
on Sep 24, 2004 -
10 comments
The
Chicago River was essentially the city of Chicago's cesspool until the construction of the Chicago Ship & Sanitary Canal, which connected the Chicago River to the Mississippi Basin in 1900. Now there's
serious talk of intentionally returning a section of the river to a cesspool-like state, by dumping untreated sewage and (possibly) toxic chemicals into the river. The purpose: to prevent invasive species such as the
Asian Carp and the
Round Goby from using this connection to cross between the Great Lakes and Mississippi basins. Is it ever possible to avoid unintended consequences in environmental engineering? And is it necessary to "go nuclear", so to speak, to try to correct them?
[Second link RealAudio; transcript here.]
posted by Johnny Assay
on Mar 4, 2003 -
9 comments
River found under Sahara Russian satellites have discovered a river flowing 700 feet under the Sahara.
It carries enough water to supply 50,000 people and is said to surge with "colossal power".
---the thing that interests me most about this is the economic impact that this will have on the area. seeing as how wars are being fought over water supplies in the area, what do you see as the most likely result of this discovery??
posted by daHIFI
on Sep 17, 2002 -
24 comments
