New Zealand has no problems with salinity because its rivers take the salt off the land and back out to sea. Why doesn that happen here?
Australia is so different from any other land. Rivers normally build on high ground and run briskly down slopes and disappear into the sea. When rivers behave like that around the coastal parts of Australia any excess salts that get into river systems is carried back into the sea. However most of our major rivers rise on the western flanks of the Great Dividing Range and they don’t run briskly down slopes and into the sea, they run into a very flat landscape. In the case of the Murray Darling it’s our major river system and it travels mainly westward and then it has one very small exit to the sea. So you’ve got inward flowing rivers in a continent with a sunken centre. You end up with a very flat land, it gets flatter and flatter retaining its sediment and it becomes a land of flood plains and at the same time of course it is retaining its salt.
Related Questions
- New Zealand has no problems with salinity because its rivers take the salt off the land and back out to sea. Why doesn that happen here?
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