this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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Here's some wild river history for you:
The great lakes are super big, have huge flow rates, Superior is famously super deep since it's a continental-rift lake that was widened by glacial retreat .... But they only formed like 14,000 years ago when the glaciers retreated...
The river Tyne in England is 30 million years old, just when Antarctica was separating from Australia and South America.
The river Thames is 58 million years old, that's just after the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs.
The Rhine is at least 240 million years old ... From the Triassic era if not earlier.
And then there's 3 rivers in Appalachia that are ~ 320 million years old... The French Broad river, the Susquehanna river, and (ironically) the New river. They've been continuously flowing since the carboniferous period, literally when Pangea first started forming and before any bacteria or enzymes could break down trees (which eventually compacted and became all the coal in the mountains that formed alongside them).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_by_age
π΅Almost Heaven, West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, growin' like a breezeπΆ
Crazy those lyrics are literal facts. Also, you win the thread.
The first part is correct, but technically both the river and life in that area predate the mountains, and all of them predate the continent by hundreds of millions of years, which is wild in its own right.
Ok but he said Susquehanna River. Not Shenandoah.
Great song though.
He sings Shenandoah.
https://genius.com/John-denver-take-me-home-country-roads-lyrics
Edit: Even better source:
https://johndenver.com/tracks/take-me-home-country-roads/
Sorry you're confused. We are referencing this comment in which masterspace mentions the Susquehanna River. Not the Shenandoah River. Somehow it made shalafi excited and his brain substituted Susquehanna for Shenandoah which reminded him of the John Denver song, which yes is a lovely song, I belt it out loud every time I drive alone through West Virginia.
Artistic license
The New river also formed a beautiful gorge where we humans built an awesome bridge and some scenic overlooks. If you find yourself driving through that southern region of WV, it is worth a detour!
https://www.nps.gov/neri/planyourvisit/nrgbridge.htm
It's a national park now too!
Funfact regarding the New River:
The Cartographers charting the river had it marked by the direction it flows, NE-W, eventually this just stuck as the name.
Building off of this, the difference between coal and oil is that coal comes from carbon that was buried before the bacteria existed to break it down, and oil after. There will eventually be more oil, but there will never be more coal
TIL I've shot rapids in a 320m year old body of water