Ancient Colorado river flowed backwards

Carnegie Institution ^ | October 4, 2010 | Unknown

[decimon]

Wry be a river ping.

[jagusafr]

Or perhaps intra-deluvian runoff...hydroplate theory, don’cha know.

[cicero2k]

All this before the SUV was invented.

[Roccus]

Water flows downhill.........who wudda thunk....

[fidelis]

Yeah; Bush’s fault.

[Calvin Locke]

I could have sworn that I learned in school that the Nile was the only major river that flowed North...

The Mississippi flowed North for a while, but that was due to an earthquake.

[pappyone]

I thought everybody knew about the backwards flowing Odaroloc river.

[CholeraJoe]

Almost all of the rivers between the Rockies and the Great Lakes in Canada flow north into Hudson Bay.

[Gaffer]

As my plumber BIL says, “Two things you gotta know about bein’ a plumber: Sh!t flows DOWNHILL, and DON’T bite your fingernails!”

[Paladin2]

Sounds like catastrophic climate change.

[mountainlion]

This has been discovered before 30 or 40 years ago.

[KC Burke]

...and the division that marks that boundry is called the laurentian divide.

[CodeToad]

“The modern Colorado River’s headwaters are in the Rocky Mountains, flowing southEAST to the river’s mouth in the Gulf of California. “

I’m pretty sure the last time I checked, like just this morning, California would be southWEST of Colorado.

[fieldmarshaldj]

Forget it, he’s rolling.

[decimon]

The Gulf of California goes pretty far to the east.

[CodeToad]

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Well the Mojave river still flows northeastward but it never gets to even Death Valley.

[decimon]

So then you see that the river terminates in the Gulf of California and not California?

[righttackle44]

This is not my favorite story about an Arizona River.

During World War II, a captured German Navy captain and other sailors were in a prisoner of war camp northeast of downtown Phoenix. He got hold of a map showing they were only a couple of miles from the Gila River. The Gila flows through central Arizona, onward to the Colorado, then into the Gulf of California. Using cast-off stuff and Obermann Super Reasoning and Intelligence, Das Boot guys built a make-shift craft and made a break for it, the Master Race men carrying their boat to the River.

What the Master Race guys didn't know until they got the river, is that the Gila is, was and has been a dry riverbed for decades, ever since the upstream dams were built upstream to conserve water and control floods. You would have thought that such superior moon would have known that before hustling a boat all that way.