Basin
2025
“Why don’t we have one?”
“One what?”
“A river here in the west like the Okavango.”
“I don’t know about it.”
“The Okavanga is in Africa. It rises in Angola, runs for a thousand miles or so and then vanishes, it never reaches an ocean or joins another river.”
“Where does it go?”
“That’s the thing. It vanishes. It reaches the Kalahari Desert and disappears. Imagine our Colorado River reaching the Mojave Desert and disappearing, or even the Virgin River flowing down through Utah and vanishing into the Mojave Desert in Nevada.”
“Rivers have to go somewhere.”
“That’s nature’s intrigue. Waters flow into a basin in the Kalahari Desert they call the Okavango Delta.”
“And then?”
“Seepage into the desert, evaporation.”
“So what we often call lakes are actually these basins?”
“Yes, known as endorheic basins. We actually have a few of them here in Nevada, Black Rock Desert, the Carson Sink from the Carson River and the Humboldt Sink from the Humboldt River.”
“But nothing on the scale of that river in Africa.”
“No.”
