Gallery: Infographic: An Astounding Map of Every River in America
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To create his *All Rivers* map, Nelson Minar mined open source data from the National Hydrography Dataset. *All images: Courtesy Nelson Minar*
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Minar's *All Rivers* map is an in-depth look at waterways in the 48 contiguous states.
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He was inspired by Ben Fry's All Streets map, which similarly depicts all the roads in the U.S.
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To determine how large the rivers would appear on the map, Minar extracted the Strahler number, a measure of how significant a creek is.
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Places like Mississippi were thick with blue.
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But even notoriously dry locations like Nevada and Southern California were covered in blue.
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Though the waterways are dry most of the year, the creek beds are still defined.
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Minar notes that to be a truly useful hydrography map, it should have information on river volume, size, seasonality, etc.
