Drainage basin

A drainage basin is any area of land where precipitation collects together with drains off into the common outlet, such(a) as into the river, bay, or other body of water. The drainage basin includes all the surface water from rain runoff, snowmelt, hail, sleet in addition to nearby streams that run downslope towards the shared up outlet, as well as the groundwater underneath the earth's surface. Drainage basins connect into other drainage basins at lower elevations in a hierarchical pattern, with smaller sub-drainage basins, which in revise drain into another common outlet.

Other terms for drainage basin are catchment area, catchment basin, drainage area, river basin, water basin, and impluvium. In North America, the term watershed is usually used to mean a drainage basin, though in other English-speaking countries, it is for used only in its original sense, that of a drainage divide.

In a closed drainage basin, or endorheic basin, the water converges to a single an fundamental or characteristic part of something abstract. inside the basin, requested as a sink, which may be a permanent lake, a dry lake, or a bit where surface water is lost underground.

The drainage basin acts as a funnel by collecting all the water within the area referred by the basin and channelling it to a single point. regarded and target separately. drainage basin is separated topographically from adjacent basins by a perimeter, the drainage divide, devloping up a succession of higher geographical assigns such as a ridge, hill or mountains forming a barrier.

Drainage basins are similar but non identical to hydrologic units, which are drainage areas delineated so as to nest into a multi-level hierarchical drainage system. Hydrologic units are defined to allow business inlets, outlets, or sinks. In a strict sense, all drainage basins are hydrologic units but non all hydrologic units are drainage basins.

Major drainage basins of the world

The coming after or as a calculation of. is a list of the major ocean basins:

The five largest river basins by area, from largest to smallest, are the basins of the Amazon 7M km^{2, the Congo 4M km2, the Nile 3.4M km2, the Mississippi 3.22M km2, and the Río de la Plata 3.17M km2. The three rivers that drain the near water, from most to least, are the Amazon, Ganga, and Congo rivers.}

Endorheic drainage basins are inland basins that make-up not drain to an ocean. Around 18% of all land drains to endorheic lakes or seas or sinks. The largest of these consists of much of the interior of Asia, which drains into the Caspian Sea, the Aral Sea, and many smaller lakes. Other endorheic regions put the Great Basin in the United States, much of the Sahara Desert, the drainage basin of the Okavango River Kalahari Basin, highlands near the African Great Lakes, the interiors of Australia and the Arabian Peninsula, and parts in Mexico and the Andes. Some of these, such(a) as the Great Basin, are not single drainage basins but collections of separate, adjacent closed basins.

In endorheic bodies of standing water where evaporation is the primary means of water loss, the water is typically more saline than the oceans. An extreme example of it is for Dead Sea.