What is the narrowest river in the world?
The narrowest river on the planet is only 4 centimeters wide! There is a river on the planet that is only a few centimeters wide and can easily be crossed. At first glance, this tiny body of water has a high risk of disappearing, but it is unlikely to happen: the river is thousands years old, and in fact, it has always been the narrowest river on the planet.
The widest river in the world is located in South America: it is La Plata, an estuary of two rivers. At its confluence, La Plata reaches 48 km in width, and at its confluence with the Atlantic turns into a real sea, increasing several times. There is also the Amazon, which in the dry season is about 11 km wide, and in the rainy season is three or four times as wide.
There are many other rivers on Earth whose banks are a couple of kilometers apart. This makes it even harder to imagine that a narrow body of water in China only a few centimeters wide could even be called a river. It is so narrow that it can be crossed, literally everywhere.
The world’s narrowest river is called Hualai. What is the average width of the Hualai? It is 15 centimeters, and somewhere its flow narrows to four centimeters. However, the Hualay has the status of a river, because in fact, the width is not the main feature of this type of water body. Especially since the Hualai has plenty of all other attributes of the river: it is a permanent body of water that runs continuously throughout the year, it has a delineated basin, characteristic banks that it floods, and the length of the river is 17 kilometers long.
The depth of the Hualai is also impressive for a small river: 50 centimeters. And the most surprising thing is that even fish swim into it: the locals say that sometimes the fish literally have to squeeze between the banks.
The Hualai originates from an underground spring, runs through the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, and flows into Lake Dalai-Mur. According to Chinese experts, the river is about 10 thousand years old. However, this age can hardly be called old, because this is nothing for a river, the age of river reservoirs is counted in millions of years: for example, the Amazon is 9 million years old.
By the way, Hualai has a more poetic name. It is also called the “Book Bridge River”. This name comes from an interesting folk legend. It is said that a boy once tried to cross Hualai and accidentally dropped a book. He was stepping just in the narrowest place, and the book fell so that it connected the two banks. The ants took advantage of this, and the tome became a bridge for them to cross to the other side of the Hualai.
