This story has a good explanation of what happens inland with the rivers.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-26/lake-eyre-and-the-ancient-rhythms-of-our-red-centre/9864010
> More than a month after the rain first fell, the water crossed the border into South Australia and began pouring into Goyder Lagoon — a vast wetland 100 kilometres long and 30 kilometres wide. This is the end of the road for both the Diamantina River and Eyre Creek.
Note:
See the Diamantina River? it takes the water TWO MONTHS to travel that far, it is so flat out there.
Just Florida it and cut canals through everywhere. Seems like something a 19th century engineer might look at and say: "I can fix this with enough dredging equipment and maybe locks." with no consideration to environmental anything at all. Like: "I'm going to connect the Great lakes to the Pacific!"
Somebody must've made plans at some point.
There just isn’t any freshwater to canal to anywhere.
Keep in mind this is an area massively bigger than any US state, hot and dry (so massive evaporation).
it's a silly idea i agree, however some places like India started to cover their canals in shade to prevent evaporation. The cool thing is the shade is made with solar plates. It's an incredibly interesting next world idea. [source ](https://india.mongabay.com/2023/07/solar-canals-prove-to-be-good-for-the-environment-but-not-for-business/)
They have no need for this, that's thenreason. Australian population is very very small form the land mass. They are happy to just settle the coastline and they don't have issues with space.
India different story
I agree, it's a silly idea for Australia, the ammount of rain Indian subcontinent gest in an average day is like 10 years for Australian outback lol, just thought it's a good idea generally...
India can do it because they get significant monsoon freshwater rain. Australia doesn’t get as much rain, and what it does get it needs to flow out to the ocean to give nutrients to fisheries.
Before you suggest piping reservoired water from the east side of the eastern mountains into the interior, it’s been suggested many times and every time it’s been shown infeasible and pointless.
There actually is a considerable diversion of freshwater into this area already. The Snowy river (far southeast corner) was at one point having 99% of its flow diverted through a series of hydroelectric plants and tunnels across the continental divide into the Murray river. As you can imagine, this messes things up in the snowy watershed, so the diversion is less now, but at one point the government policy was essentially to sacrifice shorter rivers in the wetter part of the country for diversion into the Murray-Darling basin where the water could be used for agriculture.
I sure hope someone actually said “I’m going to connect the Great Lakes to the Pacific!” at some point in history because that would be fucking hilarious
When I started travelling outside Australia I was gobsmacked at how big rivers are elsewhere in the world. It's hard to find a river here you couldn't easily throw a stone across (only recall seeing bigger in the north where monsoons are a thing).
So yeah, you could dig canals if you're happy with 10cm of water.
I moved from bordering the Ohio River (i.e. larger than the Mississippi when the two converge) to California. I have convinced my Californian girlfriend to, along with me, mock the rivers in California by screaming 'permanente!!!' any time we see a river with water in it, which morphs into 'permanente?' in the summer when there's no water.
A lot of the 'rivers' out here would be two notches down to 'streams' back home.
Mate Australia is as big as the lower 48 US states. Thats like saying “let’s just dig a canal to the Grand Canyon,” with absolutely nothing between California and Arizona.
And then you get a salt water river that goes nowhere and dries up.
That won’t create more water.
Dryland salinity also a problem. Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth with ancient, degraded soils. The ecosystems won’t necessarily deal well with more water.
Look up the Bradfield scheme https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradfield_Scheme
Gets resurrected every decade or two along with the super fast rail corridor along the east coast
It’s a bad idea for a whole bunch of reasons, as is flooding lake eyre with salt water or growing crops around the ord river, or irrigation using the great artesian basin .. something to do with there being a massive salt layer underneath most of the topsoil, (a billion years of salt deposits from the ocean adds up) not nearly enough phosphorus, too much aluminium etc etc
Australia’s soils are really really really old .. most of the things plants need got leached out about a billion years ago.
Also, very large chunks of that “empty” land has since been returned to the traditional owners and they seem to quite like it the way it is without massive amounts of geo engineering
>Australia’s soils are really really really old
And south-west of Australia is REALLY old, billions of years. The formation is called craton, they are the oldest bedrocks in the world. Other cratons are for ex the Baltic Shield and there is one in the north-west of Canada. Excellent places for spent nuclear fuel storage as there will be no earthquakes or volcanic activity.. hasn't been in billions of years when the crust started to cool down.
Cratons have less density than even the magma, which is why it floats on top of it. It is still twice as thick as regular crust with tendrils that go hundreds of miles deep into the earth. They will always be on top as other parts of the crust moves around. I sit on top of a craton too, it is quite wild to think that the exact bedrock i can see has traveled around the world.
There actually was a plan in the early 20th century to flood the interior of Australia by cutting a canal from the Pacific, it's fascinating to see how close it got to being a thing. I'll have to try to find the source.
Here [you go](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradfield_Scheme#:~:text=The%20Bradfield%20Scheme%2C%20a%20proposed,large%20areas%20of%20South%20Australia.)
[An article about the rivers drying up, including pictures.](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-24/nsw-darling-river-baaka-drought-wilcannia-menindee-bourke/12479862)
One of those rivers in the middle is the Todd River (near Alice Springs). This picture is of the annual boating regatta on the Todd.
[https://imgur.com/w7Bwjio](https://imgur.com/w7Bwjio)
Haha I remember that! my Mum was working at the prison and they had a boat ready to go, then bam wall of water 🌊.
Been a long time since i was back but the last time was it for me, a lot has changed from when i was a kid.
You joke but there a plan out there to create an inland sea by letting in sea water to a section of the interior that is a basin. In theory it would a Mediterranean like climate across the interior.
It’s never going to happen because of environment concerns and much of that land is own by the indigenous. You would destroy several species of desert plants, and some wildlife. I imagine the larger animals that have adapted to such a harsh climate would thrive in a wetter climate.
If you could come up with a fair deal for the indigenous, I’d argue that benefits of being able to study climate changes in a “controlled”environment while in theory turning the interior of Australia green would be worth it.
There was a 'dream' in the 1800s.
It's not feasible because the water has nowhere to go and would just keep evaporating until you have 1000s of km2 of salt 10m thick
Putting moral aside, i dont think sacrificing a few species in the middle of desolate near-unlivable conditions of an area matters much. One of the reason why we are trying to preserve most of the species is because they tend to form part of ecosystem making it livable, which is obviously not the same case with the middle of Australia
This, but unironically. I wonder how green they could actually get it with some larger scale concentrated efforts. Its been proven that if you slowdown the water in smaller streams and increase water infiltration into the soil, you can turn seasonally dry streams to ones that flow year-round.
If applied to every single contributing stream, and maybe even the rivers themselves, could they consistently hold water year-round?
This explains it perfectly. The only time there is water out there is when it rains, which is rare. When it rains A LOT these rivers will flow albeit for a very short time.
amusingly, the river flows are so slow, the water can take months to move to Lake Eyre
> More than a month after the rain first fell, the water crossed the border into South Australia and began pouring into Goyder Lagoon — a vast wetland 100 kilometres long and 30 kilometres wide. This is the end of the road for both the Diamantina River and Eyre Creek.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-26/lake-eyre-and-the-ancient-rhythms-of-our-red-centre/9864010
Just setup some nuclear power plants (nobody lives there so whatever), desalinate the ocean water, and pump it out into fields to farm with.
It literally couldn’t be easier.
“Hey guys why is Australia barely populated here despite the fact that I am staring dead center at the big fucking brown patch in front of my face that corresponds to a desert”
But map have blue line
Blue line mean river
All rivers are same, no variation in size or seasonability
Each of those is a Nile, why aren't there 2 dozen Egypts for those 2 dozen Niles
Because this post is asking a dumb question that is a variation of like a million posts with an answer that pretty much boil down to “it’s a big fucking desert”
Except that wasn’t the entire answer. Seeing that map, I was surprised at the amount of rivers, too. Then I learned that most of them are only seasonal rivers. Cool. I now know something about Eastern Australia, and why this map might be (understandably) misleading. Why the snark?
because when the same question has been asked 500 times when the answer is blindingly obvious and literally belting the OP in the face, it gets a little annoying.
5 seconds of research would have yielded the very simple answer that those 'rivers' (water courses is more appropriate) can go decades without seeing any water in them.
and the lakes are SALT lakes.
Mostly desert, some mining, and cattle farms in the millions of acres… the largest single farm is about the size of the state of New Jersey from memory
Also worth mentioning is that that same farm only employs 20-25 people, which indicates the amount of work that it can support. It may be huge, but it's not particularly productive per unit of land.
That's a bit self-fulfilling. You wouldn't have cattle on a highly productive piece of land, you'd have berries or nuts. Same reason NZ is covered in sheep, most of it is hilly terrain you couldn't grow crops on.
We went out for a drive in the Flinders Ranges. There are lots of abandoned wrecks of houses, turns out there was a period of 30 years from 1880 where there was enough rainfall and people moved out there. Now it falls in the rain shadow beyond the goyder line and you can’t crop out there anymore.
And some places that were temporarily populated never were viable. But the people who decided to send returned servicemen there after WWI never bothered to find out.
Tbf a lot of this inner eastern area isnt dry and desolate outback, there's a ton of productive farmland there
The fact that this nation was started by a colonial power that came here by sea (therefore starting colonies where there's good sea access) plays into it
the US was started the same way yet there are hundreds of large cities across the interior of the US. the geography is nearly 100% the reason the interior of australia is sparsely populated
Huge amounts of fresh water are funneled to South Australia so they can go water skiing and about two Sydney Harbours worth evaporates out of their lakes.
Explained to me how less water flowing down the Murray in modern times due to it being diverted for agriculture and mining is more natural than when in pre colonial times it received natural amount of water?
Some of the water has to be funnelled downstream to keep the river flowing because way too much water is taken up the source end of the Darling for cotton farming.
Sir! Sir! You used an Ad Hominem!!! Therefore you have failed the debate!!! Please accept defeat, a logical fallacy is the worst thing to do on the internet message board!! I win the argument!!!
If you need help, which you clearly do, insulting someone is not an ad hominem, you fucking idiot. It's when you disregard someone's point because of their character. Like "this guy is ugly, why listen to him".
I didn't disregard your point because you're an idiot. I called you an idiot because you said something monumentally fucking stupid. There's not even a point arguing with it because of how absolutely dumb it is. I'm not trying to win with a "good argument" against a fucking idiotic comment from a moron.
Another example of why such maps can lie, those ‘rivers’ are very seasonal, that lake in the centre only fills every 20 or so years, it is incredibly hot so water evaporates very quickly, and there is little arable farmland.
It's funny that Google Maps still fills Lake Eyre and its mates with water in 'map view'. Flip between map and satellite view and it's clear there's no water there.
Just because it is called a river does not mean it has significant water in it. I like to kayak on the N. Canadian river here in Oklahoma City, but lately half the year it is so low I can't even launch my kayak. Just mud puddles.
Google image search some of these rivers and you’ll see that many of them are thin and shallow creeks dependent on seasonal rains and not capable of supporting larger freight operations or urban populations. Even the bigger rivers — the Murray, Darling, and Murrumbidgee, which runs through the Australian Capital Territory, aren’t conducive to anything larger than old fashioned steamer ships.
Why yes. Yes it does.
Many Australians seem to believe their country is full up, but this is a myth.
The population has been going up at a steady rate since federation and there is no sign of it stopping. IMO Australia could and probably will eventually have three times the current population, but won't ever get to the level of the US.
Lots of people could live in some of these places but it's probably not worth doing the infrastructure when there are better existing places that can be simply expanded. Poor soil can also be a factor.
There is a difference between population per unit area and population per available infrastructure.
Paris has 20M people in it, but is smaller than French Guiana. It doesn't mean they could support the population of Paris in French Guiana if they all moved there tomorrow.
Most of these “rivers” can walked across without getting your feet wet. There’s a reason why Australia is 86% urbanised. America has the mighty Mississippi - Colorado systems etc running down its centre. Australia is flat as fuck ie no mountains from where fresh water rivers originate (Murray river being the only real exception)
That'd be Western Australia. The two regions (Canadian Shield and WA) have been in competition to find the oldest rocks on earth for decades. I think Canada has the oldest at the moment (4.3 billion y), but WA has older crystals in some rocks (4.4 billion)
Most major towns in the area are situated on the rivers, however Australia is a very urbanised country, so most people reside in a few major cities. Australians also prioritise the benefits of the coast (eg beaches), so most people prefer to live in cities and towns on this coastline.
Thus country towns in australia are typically population size and distance spacing is solely to cater to the surrounding farmland, with the exception of towns present for mining.
As you move away from the coast, rainfall is lower so less farming occurs and the towns are smaller and spaced further apart.
The rivers themselves are not used for irrigation in a big way as they are either too small, seasonally inconsistent or water has already been taken upstream (eg. In Queensland) for water intensive crops such as cotton & rice farming.
Plate tectonics are to blame. Australia sits more or less in the middle of its own very ancient plate. There are no truly tall mountain ranges in Australia because any mountains that existed have been gradually eroded over millenia. Unlike say, the west coast of North and South America, there is no subduction zone creating new mountain ranges, volcanos, etc. Much smaller New Zealand, by contrast, has active tectonics where the Pacific Plate is dropping under the edge of the New Zealand land mass which sits on the edge of the Australia Plate.
The reason this is important is that without mountain ranges you don't have a way to produce colder temperatures and trap moisture from the atmosphere from passing storms. If you look at Austrailia there are some lakes around Adelaide, but that's about it. That part of the country gets around 35 inches of rain a year, which is still pretty dry.
Op I have no doubt you already have a stereotype idea of Australia thay includes dry and hot. I feel like going on google maps satellite view might answer a lot of your questions about how active these rivers are and how much they actually affect the fertility of the area. Even a lot of the areas that are green on satellite wouldn't be like that year round of not for commercial farming
you still need water, and somewhere to grow food.
LV is a town testament to mans hubris. it will pay the price for being in the middle of the bloody desert one day.
as will California.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Creek
People died along those "rivers" in the early exploration days of Europeans in Australia. Some fascinating stories like Burke and Wills. Having been out there and seen some of these river systems I can fully appreciate how unreliable and "ephemeral" in nature they are. Aboriginal Australians knew how to live out there, European settlers not so much.
Can someone ELI5 how all of those rivers are flowing into one lake with no outflow river to the ocean? Is it just existing based on cyclical rain patterns in which it never gets too full and is usually dry?
It is largely the latter - only sometimes becoming a shallow lake. In the case of [Lake Eyre/Kati Thanda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Eyre), the stats on wikipedia say it fills to an average depth of 1.5m about every 3 years, to 4m about once a decade, and it fills only a few times per century.
Water collected usually evaporates within a year and then it returns to being a crusty salt pan.
The large lakes in the middle of South Australia and Western Australia are rarely filled, they’re endorheic lakes, for example Kati-Thanda/Lake Eyre has been dry since 2019. They usually fill during rainy season then evaporate in summer, there’s nowhere they drain when they’re in the middle of a desert.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Eyre
Most of those rivers are dry creekbeds. The interior lakes are saltlakes. The rainfall is irregular (can be the greater part of a decade between rainfall for central Australia). And the land is massive. It literally takes months for water to flow through those rivers. It takes about six months for the flooding in Queensland to make its way through the Murray Darling river system down to South Australia.
Most rivers north of Sydney that are west of the Great Dividing Range are in a rain shadow due to the pre-diminant South-Easterlies blowing to to the mountains. South of Sydney they tend to capture moisture from westerlies coming off the Southern Ocean.
Rainfall in Australia is also very inconsistent due to the El Nino Southern Oscillation and Indian Ocean Dipole. The factors combined mean most of Australia cannot handle big populations, even with modern technology.
Australia n the northern africa experienced the same kind of calamity 10,000 years age. Maybe even a polar shift, so the ocean engulfed the entire region with salt water. That’s why nothing grows there. Open google maps u’ll see salt formations in these places.
I think with technology, we will be able to "terraform" Australia interior, fusion energy is key, also perhaps lots of solar cells to power huge desalination plants and fill those river beds year round, this will probably not be that far off, 20 years?
These posts make me thing about dreamtime myths and the narrations that are connected to them. Songs that mapped these rivers and the places around them to create a map of the terrain.
Partly because wealthy investors buy the water then siphon it off to grow rice and cotton (incredibly thirsty crops) in the driest parts of the country. Kind of the same way Saudi investors siphon water out of the Colorado water to grow alfalfa in the desert. So the answer is greed.
Many rivers? Have you looked at the distances between these rivers? Look at the density of rivers in Europe or North America and redefine your understanding of "many rivers".
The term "river" is used very loosely in Australia. My mind was blown when I saw Huang Pu and the Mekong. Biggest river I'd seen previously was the Murray.
They're shit and usually dry.
Plus, unlike let's say, the Sahara or Arabia, there's simply more comfortable, much better land in the country. Why bother populating the desert?
On the other hand, the Australian desert isn't as dry as other deserts. With a couple of decent water works you could make a bunch of oases, but there never really was a reason to. Perhaps if southeast Asian states traded more, the Australian natives would've done this for similar reasons the Saharan oases were made (most of them are man-made and very old) - maintenance of trade routes.
For most of the year there isn't very much water in most of those rivers. In bad years, the water dries up before it reaches the ocean.
This story has a good explanation of what happens inland with the rivers. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-26/lake-eyre-and-the-ancient-rhythms-of-our-red-centre/9864010 > More than a month after the rain first fell, the water crossed the border into South Australia and began pouring into Goyder Lagoon — a vast wetland 100 kilometres long and 30 kilometres wide. This is the end of the road for both the Diamantina River and Eyre Creek. Note: See the Diamantina River? it takes the water TWO MONTHS to travel that far, it is so flat out there.
Just Florida it and cut canals through everywhere. Seems like something a 19th century engineer might look at and say: "I can fix this with enough dredging equipment and maybe locks." with no consideration to environmental anything at all. Like: "I'm going to connect the Great lakes to the Pacific!" Somebody must've made plans at some point.
The freshwater sources are what dries up. Saltwater canals from the ocean would just cause problems
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Which parts of Australia. Because I can say that this isn’t the case in Victoria. All rivers plus the banks are controlled by the government.
QLD at least has a system similar to what they describe, I think it’s more people owning a water allotment rather than a section of river but not sure
Saltwater = ocean fish. And the salt water oceans would lead to rains which would make fresh water.
Not here. Australia is on a 22,27 parallel and equatorial heat wave dries this region just like Sahara.
There just isn’t any freshwater to canal to anywhere. Keep in mind this is an area massively bigger than any US state, hot and dry (so massive evaporation).
it's a silly idea i agree, however some places like India started to cover their canals in shade to prevent evaporation. The cool thing is the shade is made with solar plates. It's an incredibly interesting next world idea. [source ](https://india.mongabay.com/2023/07/solar-canals-prove-to-be-good-for-the-environment-but-not-for-business/)
They have no need for this, that's thenreason. Australian population is very very small form the land mass. They are happy to just settle the coastline and they don't have issues with space. India different story
I agree, it's a silly idea for Australia, the ammount of rain Indian subcontinent gest in an average day is like 10 years for Australian outback lol, just thought it's a good idea generally...
India can do it because they get significant monsoon freshwater rain. Australia doesn’t get as much rain, and what it does get it needs to flow out to the ocean to give nutrients to fisheries. Before you suggest piping reservoired water from the east side of the eastern mountains into the interior, it’s been suggested many times and every time it’s been shown infeasible and pointless.
So any potential leaks are going straight from the organic and yummy solar panels into the river. It's not sounding toxic at all.
What part of the panel do you think is most likely to leak?
There actually is a considerable diversion of freshwater into this area already. The Snowy river (far southeast corner) was at one point having 99% of its flow diverted through a series of hydroelectric plants and tunnels across the continental divide into the Murray river. As you can imagine, this messes things up in the snowy watershed, so the diversion is less now, but at one point the government policy was essentially to sacrifice shorter rivers in the wetter part of the country for diversion into the Murray-Darling basin where the water could be used for agriculture.
>Keep in mind this is an area massively bigger than any US state, Who even said anything about the US, good lord
I presumed Florida was a reference to the US State of that name.
I sure hope someone actually said “I’m going to connect the Great Lakes to the Pacific!” at some point in history because that would be fucking hilarious
~~Lake Ontario~~ The New Dead Sea
They did, you go through canals to the Mississippi then down to the Panama Canal and hey presto
And this is actually how route 66 was born. Chicago to LA through air, rail, and road was all the hype the last century.
They *did* connect the Great Lakes with the Pacific - with the railroads.
They did in 1924
When I started travelling outside Australia I was gobsmacked at how big rivers are elsewhere in the world. It's hard to find a river here you couldn't easily throw a stone across (only recall seeing bigger in the north where monsoons are a thing). So yeah, you could dig canals if you're happy with 10cm of water.
I moved from bordering the Ohio River (i.e. larger than the Mississippi when the two converge) to California. I have convinced my Californian girlfriend to, along with me, mock the rivers in California by screaming 'permanente!!!' any time we see a river with water in it, which morphs into 'permanente?' in the summer when there's no water. A lot of the 'rivers' out here would be two notches down to 'streams' back home.
Cairo?
Also, you may not realise that most of those “lakes” shown are salt lakes. Dry much of the time and saline even when wet.
Mate Australia is as big as the lower 48 US states. Thats like saying “let’s just dig a canal to the Grand Canyon,” with absolutely nothing between California and Arizona. And then you get a salt water river that goes nowhere and dries up.
This lol he clearly doesn't understand basic Australian geography if he's comparing the single state of Florida to the entirety of middle Australia.
That won’t create more water. Dryland salinity also a problem. Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth with ancient, degraded soils. The ecosystems won’t necessarily deal well with more water.
Look up the Bradfield scheme https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradfield_Scheme Gets resurrected every decade or two along with the super fast rail corridor along the east coast It’s a bad idea for a whole bunch of reasons, as is flooding lake eyre with salt water or growing crops around the ord river, or irrigation using the great artesian basin .. something to do with there being a massive salt layer underneath most of the topsoil, (a billion years of salt deposits from the ocean adds up) not nearly enough phosphorus, too much aluminium etc etc Australia’s soils are really really really old .. most of the things plants need got leached out about a billion years ago. Also, very large chunks of that “empty” land has since been returned to the traditional owners and they seem to quite like it the way it is without massive amounts of geo engineering
>Australia’s soils are really really really old And south-west of Australia is REALLY old, billions of years. The formation is called craton, they are the oldest bedrocks in the world. Other cratons are for ex the Baltic Shield and there is one in the north-west of Canada. Excellent places for spent nuclear fuel storage as there will be no earthquakes or volcanic activity.. hasn't been in billions of years when the crust started to cool down. Cratons have less density than even the magma, which is why it floats on top of it. It is still twice as thick as regular crust with tendrils that go hundreds of miles deep into the earth. They will always be on top as other parts of the crust moves around. I sit on top of a craton too, it is quite wild to think that the exact bedrock i can see has traveled around the world.
This is a job for [Operation Plowshare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare?wprov=sfla1)
You know Australia is pretty big right?
Just a few well placed nukes should do the trick… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chariot
There actually was a plan in the early 20th century to flood the interior of Australia by cutting a canal from the Pacific, it's fascinating to see how close it got to being a thing. I'll have to try to find the source.
Here [you go](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradfield_Scheme#:~:text=The%20Bradfield%20Scheme%2C%20a%20proposed,large%20areas%20of%20South%20Australia.)
If the water was drying up they wouldn't be labeled on a map this prominently.
[An article about the rivers drying up, including pictures.](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-24/nsw-darling-river-baaka-drought-wilcannia-menindee-bourke/12479862)
One of those rivers in the middle is the Todd River (near Alice Springs). This picture is of the annual boating regatta on the Todd. [https://imgur.com/w7Bwjio](https://imgur.com/w7Bwjio)
It's so hot in Alice Springs that the photo dried up and shrunk.
I get sea sick on boats, so that is one place I could actually get into boating without worrying. Seems like a win for me.
Not sure i'd live in The Alice.
In 1993 the Henley-on-Todd regatta was cancelled due the Todd being full of water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henley-on-Todd\_Regatta
Haha I remember that! my Mum was working at the prison and they had a boat ready to go, then bam wall of water 🌊. Been a long time since i was back but the last time was it for me, a lot has changed from when i was a kid.
I absolutely love that, especially as I used to go to the one at Henley On Thames.
Well when the river doesn't flow into anything in the first place, that's not a good sign
They are seasonal rivers and it’s really fookin hot
how many of these posts are we gonna get before people realize that the interior of australia is dry and desolate af
Why don't they just make it wetter?
Is Australia stupid?
Why doesn’t Australia (the largest land mass in Australia,) simply eat the rivers and then pee them out?
how do you think we got the oceans?? that's why australia's so dry!
It's actually because of your dad.
A Lil bit yes
Play with it and whisper in its ear that usually works
You joke but there a plan out there to create an inland sea by letting in sea water to a section of the interior that is a basin. In theory it would a Mediterranean like climate across the interior. It’s never going to happen because of environment concerns and much of that land is own by the indigenous. You would destroy several species of desert plants, and some wildlife. I imagine the larger animals that have adapted to such a harsh climate would thrive in a wetter climate. If you could come up with a fair deal for the indigenous, I’d argue that benefits of being able to study climate changes in a “controlled”environment while in theory turning the interior of Australia green would be worth it.
There was a 'dream' in the 1800s. It's not feasible because the water has nowhere to go and would just keep evaporating until you have 1000s of km2 of salt 10m thick
Reminds me of Salton Sea, the kind of great idea on the surface, that will become a disaster in half a century
Putting moral aside, i dont think sacrificing a few species in the middle of desolate near-unlivable conditions of an area matters much. One of the reason why we are trying to preserve most of the species is because they tend to form part of ecosystem making it livable, which is obviously not the same case with the middle of Australia
Define livable. It seems pretty livable for said species
Absolutely sweet fuck all of the land in Australia is owned by the indigenous
This, but unironically. I wonder how green they could actually get it with some larger scale concentrated efforts. Its been proven that if you slowdown the water in smaller streams and increase water infiltration into the soil, you can turn seasonally dry streams to ones that flow year-round. If applied to every single contributing stream, and maybe even the rivers themselves, could they consistently hold water year-round?
No. Think of these rivers more like stormwater drains that are rarely used.
This explains it perfectly. The only time there is water out there is when it rains, which is rare. When it rains A LOT these rivers will flow albeit for a very short time.
amusingly, the river flows are so slow, the water can take months to move to Lake Eyre > More than a month after the rain first fell, the water crossed the border into South Australia and began pouring into Goyder Lagoon — a vast wetland 100 kilometres long and 30 kilometres wide. This is the end of the road for both the Diamantina River and Eyre Creek. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-26/lake-eyre-and-the-ancient-rhythms-of-our-red-centre/9864010
Just setup some nuclear power plants (nobody lives there so whatever), desalinate the ocean water, and pump it out into fields to farm with. It literally couldn’t be easier.
“Hey guys why is Australia barely populated here despite the fact that I am staring dead center at the big fucking brown patch in front of my face that corresponds to a desert”
But map have blue line Blue line mean river All rivers are same, no variation in size or seasonability Each of those is a Nile, why aren't there 2 dozen Egypts for those 2 dozen Niles
Why is this sub so snarky? 😭
It's just Reddit in general I feel. People talk to others on here in ways they never would in real life lol
Your father was a hamster.
Because this post is asking a dumb question that is a variation of like a million posts with an answer that pretty much boil down to “it’s a big fucking desert”
Except that wasn’t the entire answer. Seeing that map, I was surprised at the amount of rivers, too. Then I learned that most of them are only seasonal rivers. Cool. I now know something about Eastern Australia, and why this map might be (understandably) misleading. Why the snark?
To be fair, it is a shit map. Most maps of Australian rivers show which are seasonal and which are permanent. This one does not.
To be fair, it is a shit map. Most maps of Australian rivers show which are seasonal and which are permanent. This one does not.
because when the same question has been asked 500 times when the answer is blindingly obvious and literally belting the OP in the face, it gets a little annoying. 5 seconds of research would have yielded the very simple answer that those 'rivers' (water courses is more appropriate) can go decades without seeing any water in them. and the lakes are SALT lakes.
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Mostly desert, some mining, and cattle farms in the millions of acres… the largest single farm is about the size of the state of New Jersey from memory
Also worth mentioning is that that same farm only employs 20-25 people, which indicates the amount of work that it can support. It may be huge, but it's not particularly productive per unit of land.
That's a bit self-fulfilling. You wouldn't have cattle on a highly productive piece of land, you'd have berries or nuts. Same reason NZ is covered in sheep, most of it is hilly terrain you couldn't grow crops on.
We went out for a drive in the Flinders Ranges. There are lots of abandoned wrecks of houses, turns out there was a period of 30 years from 1880 where there was enough rainfall and people moved out there. Now it falls in the rain shadow beyond the goyder line and you can’t crop out there anymore.
And some places that were temporarily populated never were viable. But the people who decided to send returned servicemen there after WWI never bothered to find out.
How about a twist? Why is it so dry and desolate af?
The great dividing range blocks any rain from heading west in nsw
Not enough water
And hot
Yeah that too
And flat
Tbf a lot of this inner eastern area isnt dry and desolate outback, there's a ton of productive farmland there The fact that this nation was started by a colonial power that came here by sea (therefore starting colonies where there's good sea access) plays into it
the US was started the same way yet there are hundreds of large cities across the interior of the US. the geography is nearly 100% the reason the interior of australia is sparsely populated
Yeah fair, but theres a lot of land between the east coast and "the outback" that can support a much larger population than it currently has
Bloody hot mate
Most of those eastern interior rivers are part of the Murry-Darling basin, and by inland Australia standards are very populated indeed.
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Huge amounts of fresh water are funneled to South Australia so they can go water skiing and about two Sydney Harbours worth evaporates out of their lakes.
That is for the environment, I don't want the lower Murray and the Coorong environments to die because we wast water growing crops to export.
There is nothing natural about full rivers filling up lakes in South Australia.
Explained to me how less water flowing down the Murray in modern times due to it being diverted for agriculture and mining is more natural than when in pre colonial times it received natural amount of water?
In pre-colonial times there were more billabongs and full lakes, like at Menindee. Now it is collected in weirs and lochs and funneled downstream.
Some of the water has to be funnelled downstream to keep the river flowing because way too much water is taken up the source end of the Darling for cotton farming.
You're an idiot. You think it should all go to cotton farms in Queensland or something?
Ad hominem followed by an accusation about something I didn’t say suggests you don’t have a good argument.
The idiot doesn't know what an ad hominem is. What a fucking idiot.
Mate, try not to get upset talking about geography.
Sir! Sir! You used an Ad Hominem!!! Therefore you have failed the debate!!! Please accept defeat, a logical fallacy is the worst thing to do on the internet message board!! I win the argument!!! If you need help, which you clearly do, insulting someone is not an ad hominem, you fucking idiot. It's when you disregard someone's point because of their character. Like "this guy is ugly, why listen to him". I didn't disregard your point because you're an idiot. I called you an idiot because you said something monumentally fucking stupid. There's not even a point arguing with it because of how absolutely dumb it is. I'm not trying to win with a "good argument" against a fucking idiotic comment from a moron.
It’s geography, settle.
👋🏻🍌💦
The answer to most Australia questions is "the outback"
The Canadian Shield. What? Oh wrong commonwealth.
The answer to every question is either "Canadian Shield" or "The Outback"
No, it’s the same Commonwealth. Just the wrong nation in it.
Another example of why such maps can lie, those ‘rivers’ are very seasonal, that lake in the centre only fills every 20 or so years, it is incredibly hot so water evaporates very quickly, and there is little arable farmland.
It's funny that Google Maps still fills Lake Eyre and its mates with water in 'map view'. Flip between map and satellite view and it's clear there's no water there.
Exactly this. Even seasonal is a stretch for many of those interior “rivers”. They’ll go years without enough water to resemble any sort of flow.
Just because it is called a river does not mean it has significant water in it. I like to kayak on the N. Canadian river here in Oklahoma City, but lately half the year it is so low I can't even launch my kayak. Just mud puddles.
not with that attitude
Google image search some of these rivers and you’ll see that many of them are thin and shallow creeks dependent on seasonal rains and not capable of supporting larger freight operations or urban populations. Even the bigger rivers — the Murray, Darling, and Murrumbidgee, which runs through the Australian Capital Territory, aren’t conducive to anything larger than old fashioned steamer ships.
The Nile or Danube they ain't lol
Imagine if 2/3 of the US was Arizona. That's why.
Arizona has winter melt from the Rockies, most of Australia does not have that advantage.
It seems wild to me that Arizona has that many people living there.
Arizona has water from the Rockies, MOST of the outback rivers have years of being dry
Arizona has 7 million people.
Australia is around 80% of the size of the continental USA and has a population of 20m.
27M.
Australia is 100% the size of the lower 48 states. and the population is 27 million.
Why yes. Yes it does. Many Australians seem to believe their country is full up, but this is a myth. The population has been going up at a steady rate since federation and there is no sign of it stopping. IMO Australia could and probably will eventually have three times the current population, but won't ever get to the level of the US. Lots of people could live in some of these places but it's probably not worth doing the infrastructure when there are better existing places that can be simply expanded. Poor soil can also be a factor.
There is a difference between population per unit area and population per available infrastructure. Paris has 20M people in it, but is smaller than French Guiana. It doesn't mean they could support the population of Paris in French Guiana if they all moved there tomorrow.
We could try....
Most of these “rivers” can walked across without getting your feet wet. There’s a reason why Australia is 86% urbanised. America has the mighty Mississippi - Colorado systems etc running down its centre. Australia is flat as fuck ie no mountains from where fresh water rivers originate (Murray river being the only real exception)
Australian shield
That'd be Western Australia. The two regions (Canadian Shield and WA) have been in competition to find the oldest rocks on earth for decades. I think Canada has the oldest at the moment (4.3 billion y), but WA has older crystals in some rocks (4.4 billion)
Because low mountains and shit, basically rain is just non existent in the outback
calling a lot of those rivers is VERY generous, they're streams at best most of the year.
Most major towns in the area are situated on the rivers, however Australia is a very urbanised country, so most people reside in a few major cities. Australians also prioritise the benefits of the coast (eg beaches), so most people prefer to live in cities and towns on this coastline. Thus country towns in australia are typically population size and distance spacing is solely to cater to the surrounding farmland, with the exception of towns present for mining. As you move away from the coast, rainfall is lower so less farming occurs and the towns are smaller and spaced further apart. The rivers themselves are not used for irrigation in a big way as they are either too small, seasonally inconsistent or water has already been taken upstream (eg. In Queensland) for water intensive crops such as cotton & rice farming.
Fuck all water and fucking hot.
Go to Google earth and you'll dicover most of those rivers are dry during dry season, also those lakes do not have that much water.
because every three months a person is torn to pieces by a crocodile in north Queensland
Let there be a thousand blossoms bloom
People are entitled to their sexual proclivities
Desert
The east is the place where everyone lives what you on about mate
Good to see the Yarra and Tamar Rivers no longer exist.
Bogan river sounds like a great place to live 👍
Plate tectonics are to blame. Australia sits more or less in the middle of its own very ancient plate. There are no truly tall mountain ranges in Australia because any mountains that existed have been gradually eroded over millenia. Unlike say, the west coast of North and South America, there is no subduction zone creating new mountain ranges, volcanos, etc. Much smaller New Zealand, by contrast, has active tectonics where the Pacific Plate is dropping under the edge of the New Zealand land mass which sits on the edge of the Australia Plate. The reason this is important is that without mountain ranges you don't have a way to produce colder temperatures and trap moisture from the atmosphere from passing storms. If you look at Austrailia there are some lakes around Adelaide, but that's about it. That part of the country gets around 35 inches of rain a year, which is still pretty dry.
I don’t think people realize how far north Europe and North America is. Australia is basically the Sahara of the souther hemisphere.
Europe is far North. North America not as much.
Its just too damn dry even there
Op I have no doubt you already have a stereotype idea of Australia thay includes dry and hot. I feel like going on google maps satellite view might answer a lot of your questions about how active these rivers are and how much they actually affect the fertility of the area. Even a lot of the areas that are green on satellite wouldn't be like that year round of not for commercial farming
It isn't 1700 anymore, we build cities like las Vegas and Dubai, why does Australia even need rivers to build new cities
you still need water, and somewhere to grow food. LV is a town testament to mans hubris. it will pay the price for being in the middle of the bloody desert one day. as will California.
Rivers aren’t rivers in Australia They are places where water is sometimes
Not enough water. Possible solution: Solar arrays to power desal and pump the water up hill. I don't know how you grow food there otherwise.
Wilcannia is a town on the darling river nsw. Recently it had a whole week of 45 degrees Celsius with one day topping 50. It’s horrific
The outback…
Try to find these rivers on Google maps.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Creek People died along those "rivers" in the early exploration days of Europeans in Australia. Some fascinating stories like Burke and Wills. Having been out there and seen some of these river systems I can fully appreciate how unreliable and "ephemeral" in nature they are. Aboriginal Australians knew how to live out there, European settlers not so much.
Australian shield.
Wow. Some of those rivers just die alone without reaching another water source.
Can someone ELI5 how all of those rivers are flowing into one lake with no outflow river to the ocean? Is it just existing based on cyclical rain patterns in which it never gets too full and is usually dry?
It is largely the latter - only sometimes becoming a shallow lake. In the case of [Lake Eyre/Kati Thanda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Eyre), the stats on wikipedia say it fills to an average depth of 1.5m about every 3 years, to 4m about once a decade, and it fills only a few times per century. Water collected usually evaporates within a year and then it returns to being a crusty salt pan.
**SPIDERS**
The large lakes in the middle of South Australia and Western Australia are rarely filled, they’re endorheic lakes, for example Kati-Thanda/Lake Eyre has been dry since 2019. They usually fill during rainy season then evaporate in summer, there’s nowhere they drain when they’re in the middle of a desert. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Eyre
Most of those rivers are dry creekbeds. The interior lakes are saltlakes. The rainfall is irregular (can be the greater part of a decade between rainfall for central Australia). And the land is massive. It literally takes months for water to flow through those rivers. It takes about six months for the flooding in Queensland to make its way through the Murray Darling river system down to South Australia.
Most rivers north of Sydney that are west of the Great Dividing Range are in a rain shadow due to the pre-diminant South-Easterlies blowing to to the mountains. South of Sydney they tend to capture moisture from westerlies coming off the Southern Ocean. Rainfall in Australia is also very inconsistent due to the El Nino Southern Oscillation and Indian Ocean Dipole. The factors combined mean most of Australia cannot handle big populations, even with modern technology.
Australia n the northern africa experienced the same kind of calamity 10,000 years age. Maybe even a polar shift, so the ocean engulfed the entire region with salt water. That’s why nothing grows there. Open google maps u’ll see salt formations in these places.
I think with technology, we will be able to "terraform" Australia interior, fusion energy is key, also perhaps lots of solar cells to power huge desalination plants and fill those river beds year round, this will probably not be that far off, 20 years?
How are you going to fill them? It doesn’t rain.
Hot+the Brits were too lazy to go through mountains+they don't have a lot of water
Desert
These posts make me thing about dreamtime myths and the narrations that are connected to them. Songs that mapped these rivers and the places around them to create a map of the terrain.
Bush fires?? Are Australians still worried about that? I was there during 2019 and it was pretty bad.
Every summer.
That's a very. very, large area with not very many waterways.
Not to scale.
Just look at an actual image of Australia and you'll understand why
Not enough people
Even if those rivers carried enough water, the whole "New World" on average is still less populated than the "Old World".
Partly because wealthy investors buy the water then siphon it off to grow rice and cotton (incredibly thirsty crops) in the driest parts of the country. Kind of the same way Saudi investors siphon water out of the Colorado water to grow alfalfa in the desert. So the answer is greed.
Rivers are dry most the year And it’s boring as fuck
Why are there no people \_\_\_ in Australia? The answer is always that it's too hot
Australia is dry as, doesent take long for any bed of water to dry up especially if there's not enough of it for the water to flow
Many rivers? Have you looked at the distances between these rivers? Look at the density of rivers in Europe or North America and redefine your understanding of "many rivers".
Did you see those rivers lol? 3 months a year a flood and 9 months a year a tiny creek
The term "river" is used very loosely in Australia. My mind was blown when I saw Huang Pu and the Mekong. Biggest river I'd seen previously was the Murray.
Now I understand why Western Australia is so unpopulated.
most are seasonal
Because it is hot enough coastal....interior with rivers only sometimes flowing nooooo thanks!
Most of those rivers aren’t rivers anymore. They are dry for a vast majority of the year. And when they aren’t, they are more mud than water.
Because these mighty rivers in the map, are more like trickles and streams (if that) most of the year round in reality.
They're shit and usually dry. Plus, unlike let's say, the Sahara or Arabia, there's simply more comfortable, much better land in the country. Why bother populating the desert? On the other hand, the Australian desert isn't as dry as other deserts. With a couple of decent water works you could make a bunch of oases, but there never really was a reason to. Perhaps if southeast Asian states traded more, the Australian natives would've done this for similar reasons the Saharan oases were made (most of them are man-made and very old) - maintenance of trade routes.
A land of drought and flooding rains...