Does the Mississippi River really flow into the Ohio River?

[roadman65]

Seen a topic on FB about that the Ohio River that flows into the Mississippi River at Cairo, IL has a higher flow rate than the river it flows into. Don't know if it's true, but someone did say this argument always was up for debate for years.

If it were true than the flow of the Ohio River into the mighty Mississippi is a misconception.

[triplemultiplex]

Certainly true some of the time.  Probably not right now as the upper Mississippi is surging with snowmelt.

Looks like this time of year on average, the Ohio has about 100,000 cubic feet per second more discharge than the Mississippi above the twos confluence.
Though at present, the Mississippi has about three times the flow as the Ohio.  Aforementioned snowmelt and all...

[TheHighwayMan3561]

Someone on this board (from Ohio, unsurprisingly) has a signature referring to this.

[hbelkins]

I've seen this fact stated quite often, and recently saw an aerial photo that seemed to confirm it. The Ohio is wider than the Mississippi where they come together at Cairo, Ill./Wickliffe, Ky.

[ilpt4u]

Considering both rivers have plenty of locks & dams, can this seriously be questioned at this time?

[wxfree]

I would look at this the other way.  The Mississippi River is the part that reaches the Gulf of Mexico.  The question is whether the Mississippi originates in the East or in the North.  You could say that the Minnesota River (following the main stem) joins the Missouri, which joins the Mississippi at Cairo.  I would propose (just to be contrarian) that the Mississippi starts in the Northwest and picks up the Minnesota and Ohio.

I don't think that flow rates should be the exclusive definition.  The Ohio drains a smaller but wetter area.  The Missouri drains a larger but drier area.  I think putting the main stem (whatever the name of it is, up the middle channel is a good balance.  It's a better place on the map to put the river that gives the name to the entire basin.  I suspect the reason for the choice is historical, as the river bank was once the nation's west coast.  The Louisiana Purchase acquired everything on the west side of a single river within its basin, not everything west of the Mississippi up to the Missouri, west of the Missouri up to the Minnesota, and west of the Minnesota up to its source.  They had to write these documents with quills while wearing powdered wigs back then, so using a single river to speed up the process was the option chosen.

[CtrlAltDel]

I suspect the reason for the choice is historical, as the river bank was once the nation's west coast.  The Louisiana Purchase acquired everything on the west side of a single river within its basin, not everything west of the Mississippi up to the Missouri, west of the Missouri up to the Minnesota, and west of the Minnesota up to its source.  They had to write these documents with quills while wearing powdered wigs back then, so using a single river to speed up the process was the option chosen.

I'm not an expert on this, but I'm pretty sure the rivers were named well before these documents were drawn up.

[wxfree]

I suspect the reason for the choice is historical, as the river bank was once the nation's west coast.  The Louisiana Purchase acquired everything on the west side of a single river within its basin, not everything west of the Mississippi up to the Missouri, west of the Missouri up to the Minnesota, and west of the Minnesota up to its source.  They had to write these documents with quills while wearing powdered wigs back then, so using a single river to speed up the process was the option chosen.

I'm not an expert on this, but I'm pretty sure the rivers were named well before these documents were drawn up.

I'm pretty sure that's correct.  The word is from the French rendering of the name from a native language.  People a long time ago, who probably didn't know what the whole basin looked like, decided which was the main stem.  I don't know why.  I would guess that they didn't know which river sent more water through on average, but they knew which flooded more often, and called that the primary and the one from the east the tributary (I'm guessing that the Mississippi floods more often than the Ohio, or would in their natural states, because of annual snowmelt, sometimes combined with spring rains).  My earlier version of history was just a bureaucracy joke.

[SSOWorld]

Someone's bored.

[Stephane Dumas]

Someone's bored.

And so am I, what's next, some part of the Mississippi overflow to the Great Lakes via the Illinois and Chigago rivers thanks to the canals lol?  

[NWI_Irish96]

Considering both rivers have plenty of locks & dams, can this seriously be questioned at this time?

Yeah I think this is the main reason why you can't really answer this question anymore.

[roadman65]

One thing for sure. The confluence at Cairo is like that at the Ohio's other in in Pittsburgh.

[roadman65]

https://www.google.com/maps/@36.9784401,-89.1967601,12.23z/data=!4m2!10m1!1e1

https://goo.gl/maps/kzyvgcEAm8aVzhYG8
View from US 60-62 crossing the Mississippi shows the Ohio straight through and the Mississippi bends.

https://goo.gl/maps/njpEgN51zsq3Y6gb7
View from US 51-60-62 crossing the Ohio looking downstream shows the upper Mississippi joining it.

[kalvado]

https://goo.gl/maps/kzyvgcEAm8aVzhYG8
View from US 60-62 crossing the Mississippi shows the Ohio straight through and the Mississippi bends.

Given that Mississippi makes 2 U-turns just north of that, probably not a real argument.

[ilpt4u]

https://goo.gl/maps/kzyvgcEAm8aVzhYG8
View from US 60-62 crossing the Mississippi shows the Ohio straight through and the Mississippi bends.

Given that Mississippi makes 2 U-turns just north of that, probably not a real argument.

Flooding a couple years back had the Mississippi trying to cut a new channel to shortcut that northern U-turn bend. You can see the aftermath on Satellite view on the land near Willard

[Hobart]

I feel like this starts to get into the debate that came up at the time they started to map out the Mississippi River... Right around the headwaters, a very common question was "what stream flows into what stream".

The Mississippi just kind of got pointed at from the beginning and told, "you, my son, get all the figgy pudding", and was declared the river that runs all the way to the gulf. It could have been the Ohio, the Missouri, or any one of those small creeks that flow into the Mississippi in upstate Minnesota.

What's really ironic here is that the single most influential river is named after probably one of the least influential states in the entire country.

[Scott5114]

I'm pretty sure the state was named after the river rather than the other way around.

[Chris]

The average discharge at Cairo is 281,000 cu ft/s (8,000 m3/s) for the Ohio River and 208,200 cu ft/s (5,900 m3/s) for the Mississippi River.

According to Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is never wrong!

This makes the Ohio River a larger river by flow by a considerable margin.

A similar situation exists in Russia, where the Kama River is larger than the Volga River at the confluence.

[kalvado]

The average discharge at Cairo is 281,000 cu ft/s (8,000 m3/s) for the Ohio River and 208,200 cu ft/s (5,900 m3/s) for the Mississippi River.

According to Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is never wrong!

This makes the Ohio River a larger river by flow by a considerable margin.

A similar situation exists in Russia, where the Kama River is larger than the Volga River at the confluence.

Discharge depends on the season and weather. It may be possible to find datasets pointing either way. Not to mention possible long term change in weather patterns, natural and artificial. Corn sweat is real.
As for Volga-Kama, I looked at the numbers a while ago. Looks like almost precise 50-50 split there, definitely possible to select a dataset to support either being the primary river.

Fun fact : right now, morning of 4/24/23,   Mississippi discharge is 283k ft³/s while Ohio is 93.5k (data from stations above confluence). Bad day to start the discussion, Ohio looses by a factor of 3.

[Buck87]

Regarding the name "Mississippi", my understanding is that the French named it after what the natives they encountered in what is now Minnesota called the river. So essentially, it got named from the the top down rather than from the bottom up. I would imagine that the natives in the modern day Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi areas had their own words for that portion of the river that are now lost to history.

As for the topic of this thread, here's a relevant chart from the USGS:

Someone on this board (from Ohio, unsurprisingly) has a signature referring to this.

That was me, though it's been a while since I went to not having a signature at all.

[kphoger]

What's really ironic here is that the single most influential river is named after probably one of the least influential states in the entire country.

I'm pretty sure the state was named after the river rather than the other way around.

Regarding the name "Mississippi", my understanding is that the French named it after what the natives they encountered in what is now Minnesota called the river. So essentially, it got named from the the top down rather than from the bottom up.

Correct.  The name 'Mississippi' is how explorers/traders rendered the Ojibwe name for the river.  Follow the flow of that river southward, and you reach the gulf.  Then, later, a southern territory was named after the river.

[Chris]

The volume and size of the barge traffic on the Mississippi is fascinating. While Europe has some rivers with a large number of inland ships, they do not have the scale of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.

The U.S. is blessed with such a large natural transportation system, in the middle of the continent, serving a huge agricultural area with reliable output. It's one of the things in U.S. geography that really stands out if you think about it.

Almost no other country in the world has this combination, maybe the closest thing is the Yangtze in China. The Ganges and Indus shipping is not very developed as far as I know. The Mekong is impassable on the border of Cambodia and Laos. The Rhine in Europe is significant, though substantially smaller in scale, with the bulk of waterborne trade on a relatively short distance. The Nile banks are intensively farmed, but only on a narrow strip of land. The Amazon doesn't really serve much agriculture as far as I know.

[kphoger]

Until just a year or two ago, my wife and I slept on a bed that had long ago been shipped to Minnesota on a Mississippi River barge.  Our middle son now sleeps on the original horse-hair mattress because we were able to find a futon to match the now-defunct mattress size, the disassembled frame is down in basement storage, and the box spring (with individual coils tied together with a zillion pieces of twine and with no top frame) I ripped apart and left in the out-shed.

[Rothman]

The volume and size of the barge traffic on the Mississippi is fascinating. While Europe has some rivers with a large number of inland ships, they do not have the scale of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.

The U.S. is blessed with such a large natural transportation system, in the middle of the continent, serving a huge agricultural area with reliable output. It's one of the things in U.S. geography that really stands out if you think about it.

Almost no other country in the world has this combination, maybe the closest thing is the Yangtze in China. The Ganges and Indus shipping is not very developed as far as I know. The Mekong is impassable on the border of Cambodia and Laos. The Rhine in Europe is significant, though substantially smaller in scale, with the bulk of waterborne trade on a relatively short distance. The Nile banks are intensively farmed, but only on a narrow strip of land. The Amazon doesn't really serve much agriculture as far as I know.

Mesopotamia...

[roadman65]

The Missouri River is the path of Lewis and Clark if I'm not mistaken. They followed it before climbing the Rockies to find the Columbia River to make it all the way to Fort Clatsup in Oregon.