Week 3: Running Water - The Yangtze River

    While exploring in Shanghai, China, one of the only ways to travel across the seaport city (such as from main Shanghai to Changxing Island to Chongming Island) is the Shanghai Yangtze River Tunnel and Bridge:

The Shanghai Yangtze River Tunnel and Bridge

The area that this amazing man-made structure crosses is also where the Yangtze River, the third longest river in the world, ends into the East China Seas.

Yangtze River Map

    The Yangtze River is mainly sourced by several tributaries from the eastern section of the Tibetan Plateau, specifically by the glaciers that feed the Tuotuo River near the Geladandong Mountain in the Tanggula Mountains. The river is the longest in Asia, and passes through 10 Chinese provinces. The course that the Yangtze flows and meanders can be considered in three different sections: an upstream section that runs through the high Tibetan Plateau and highland mountains/valleys consisting of Cenozoic sediments (where the river falls more than 5,200 meters), a middle course that consists of lower mountains and hills (and houses the gorgeous Three Gorges area), and the lower section, where the current slows into the planes, and the water level fluctuates due to flood seasons and a number of large lakes, until emptying beside Shanghai. 
    At its mouth, the Yangtze River was thought to have output about 235 cubic miles of total water volume annually (which has decreased since the completion of the Three Gorges Dam), and the suspended sediment load is thought to be about 478 million tons per year. Flooding is an ever-constant issue, as the high amount of sediment and alluvium loads (which colors the river a coffee brown) as it moves downstream, extensive and destructive flooding can occur, such as in 1998, which resulted in over 3,700 people dead, 15 million people homeless, and $26 billion dollars in damages. China has continued to attempt to implement several flood-control measures to try to control the floods, such as with the Three Gorges Dam.
   One of the most gorgeous sections of the Yangtze River is the aforementioned Three Gorges (made of the Qutang, Wu, and Xiling gorges), renowned for its beauty, religious and historical influence, and also home of the Three Gorges Dam, a hydropowered power plant that is the world's largest (and most controversial, due to its economic and environmental consequences). Still, all things considered, the Yangtze River is one of the most important and impactful rivers in the world, and certainly hard to miss when visiting China!

A view above Three Gorges

A boat travelling in Three Gorges