1892 Perron map: Sources of Colorado River, #147

Description: Perron16_147 1892 Perron map: Sources of Colorado River, #147 Nice map titled Sources du Colorado, from wood engraving with fine detail and clear impression. Overall size approx. 21.5 x 13.5 cm, image size approx. 14 x 8.5 cm. From: Les Etats Unis, volume no. 16 of La Nouvelle Géographie universelle, la terre et les hommes, 19 volumes (1875-94), great work of Elisee Reclus. Cartographer is Charles Perron. Colorado River major river of North America, rising in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, U.S., and flowing generally west and south for 1,450 miles (2,330 kilometres) into the Gulf of California in northwestern Mexico. Its drainage basin covers 246,000 square miles (637,000 square kilometres) and includes parts of seven states—Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and California. For 17 miles the river forms the international boundary between the U.S. state of Arizona and Mexico. The river drains a vast arid and semiarid sector of the North American continent, and because of its intensive development it is often referred to as the “Lifeline of the Southwest.” For more than a thousand miles of its course, the Colorado has cut a deep gorge. Where the river system is joined by lateral streams—the Virgin, Kanab, Paria, Escalante, Dirty Devil, and Green rivers from the west, and the Little Colorado, San Juan, Dolores, and Gunnison from the east—a transverse system of narrow, winding deep canyons has been cut. Each entering river and each lateral creek has cut another canyon, and thus the upper and middle parts of the Colorado basin are traversed by a labyrinth of deep gorges. The longest of these unbroken trunk canyons through which the Colorado flows is the spectacular Grand Canyon, extending from the mouth of the Paria to the Grand Wash Stream. Other canyons cut by the river include Marble Canyon, Glen Canyon, and Cataract Canyon. Canyonlands National Park encompasses another of these regions at the juncture of the Green and Colorado rivers in southeastern Utah. Farther downstream the lower Colorado is flanked by two great deserts, the Mojave and the Sonoran. In a subsection of the Sonoran Desert comprising the Colorado and Yuma deserts lies the Salton Trough (Salton Basin), a large structural depression extending to the northwest from the head of the Gulf of California for a distance of 150 miles. At one time the gulf extended farther to the northwest, above the point at which the Colorado now enters. As the river brought its load of silt from the mountains and hills above to the gulf, however, it gradually erected a vast natural dam, and the waters on the north were separated from those on the south. The Colorado then cut a channel into the lower gulf. The upper waters, cut off from the sea, gradually evaporated, forming a large area of desert land extending to about 235 feet below sea level. In 1905 floodwaters caused, about three miles south of the California-Mexico border, a break in diversion controls of the Imperial Canal. As a result, the waters of the Colorado rushed into the Salton Sink, creating the Salton Sea, about 70 feet deep, 50 miles long, and 10 to 15 miles wide, with a total water area of some 300 square miles. The break threatened to inundate the agriculturally rich Imperial Valley and to permanently block a major railroad route. Because of the imminent danger, the railroad repaired the break and in 1907 completed a line of protective levees. Today the Salton Sea acts as a receiving basin for wastewater from irrigation projects in the Imperial and Coachella valleys, which in turn receive their water from the Colorado via the All-American Canal.

Price: 19.96 USD

Location: Zagreb, HR

End Time: 2024-12-01T10:20:00.000Z

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