Rivers don't always run to the sea.

In 2007 I was travelling through Kyrgyzstan when I discovered that one of the the lessons I was taught in geography at school was wrong. I noted the mistake in my description of the journey but only recently learnt that there is terminology to describe the feature. In my journey log I noted:

We also travelled near the Chuy River (pronounced: "chewy") which our guide said was the second longest in Kyrgyzstan. In one respect this river was unlike any I had seen or heard of. I have always thought of rivers as rising in high ground and eventually finding their way to the sea. However, the Chuy River flows into Kazakhstan where it eventually disappears in the steppe.

Recently, I was reading an article which referred to an endorheic basin. Briefly, an endorheic basin is the end point of a rivers flow which is not another river or an ocean. This "unusual" feature of the Chuy River was explained to me when I was near the rivers origin in the Kochkor District of Kyrgyzstan. It then flows for more than 1000km through Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan where it eventually fades away into the steppe a little short of the Syr Darya River which flows to the Aral Sea (an endorheic basin). The Chuy is still unusual in the sense that it doesn't end at a body of water. It also passes withing a few kilometers of Issyk-Kul, an endorheic lake in Kyrgyzstan.

I have spoken to several people who also recall being taught this fallacious fact. I suspect that it is a true statement about rivers in England, and maybe even the United Kingdom but I do not remember any such qualifier when it was taught to me.

Postscript after a 16 year gap I recently returned to Uzbekistan to pick up the journey I had suspended in Tashkent and continued west through Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva. While travelling between these cities we had cause to cross the Amu Darya river (historically known as the Oxus) and I learned due to the large-scale diversion of water it no longer reaches its historic terminus in the Aral Sea. This is part of why the Aral Sea is shrinking but it also means that, like the Chuy, the Amu Darya river just fades away into the desert. July 2023.

All rivers run down to the sea...

Recently, I was talking to someone when the conversation led them to state that "all rivers run down to the sea". This seems to be a widely held belief here in England and I suspect that it is something learnt at school, I certainly recall being taught this.

I took me some time to convince the individual that while it might be true in England (and I'm not even sure of this), and even that the majority of rivers flow to the sea, it is not the case that all rives flow down to the sea. One thing that they insisted on before abandoning this belief was an example, luckily I know of one.

It was while travelling in Kyrgyzstan that I saw a river for the first time that did not flow to the sea. The River Chuy is one of several in Kyrgyzstan that flows into Kazakhstan where it eventually disappears in the steppe.

Earlier today I was reading The Motion Paradox (by Joseph Mazur) which included a quote from King James Bible, Ecclesiastes 1:7: 

All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

It seems likely to me that this is the source of the mistaken belief about where rivers end up!