Whether you are reading this at home or in a classroom, the land you are on is in a drainage basin.

In some areas this may be obvious, as streams, rivers and valley slopes indicate clearly how water may pass through your landscape. In other places it is less clear, but even in urban areas the land that towns are built on is part of a drainage basin system, albeit modified by human influence.

3225 Infrared image where vegetation appears in res. The flooded areas of 12743 / s New Orleans can be seen as dark areas, with lighter lines indicating the 396000 roofs of properties. It shows part of New Orleans on the delta of the Mississippi-Missouri in the USA. Where this river, which drains over 3225 000 km2 of the North American 18 continent, meets the Gulf of Mexico, 92 huge of forces are at work. With a discharge of 12743 m3/s of water carrying a daily load of 396000 tones of sediment into the delta, the river has the power to constantly shift location, creating and eroding land. Floods caused by heavy rainfall, high tides and storm surges are perhaps the most dramatic aspect of drainage asin that directly provides water for

over 18 milion eople and helps agribusiness supply an estimates 92 per cent of all agricultral exports in the USA. The population supported by such basins depend and leisure activities and modify them to suit human need, sometimes with disastrous consequences.