Maybe you have thought that rivers have always been there, or maybe you have never thought about it at all. But today we are going to talk about rivers, because sometimes it seems that they dry up, that they disappear… But did you know there is a river that has been here for hundreds of millions of years. And it is not one of the most famous ones!
It is not the Nile or the Amazon, it is called the Finke, although for the Arrernte Aboriginal people it is Larapinta. It is estimated to be the oldest river that still exists today and to be between 300 and 400 million years old, long before the dinosaurs!
Older than almost everything we know
The Finke crosses the center of Australia, one of the driest and harshest areas of the continent, it looks like a discreet river that only carries water when it rains heavily, but its history is completely different.
When this river began to carve its path, life was barely taking off on Earth, there were no forests, no giant animals walking around, and even so, the Finke was already shaping the landscape.
How do they know this?
Because geologically it is very strange, the Finke cuts through mountains instead of going around them, it cuts through hard rocks like quartz, and the explanation for this is that the river was already there long before those mountains existed.
If you know a bit about geology, you will know that the Earth’s crust rises little by little due to the collision of plates, well, the Finke kept eroding the rocks while maintaining its original course for millions of years, patience of gold!
Did the mountains grow around it?
That’s right, the river crosses the MacDonnell Ranges, a mountain chain formed between 300 and 400 million years ago, during the so called Alice Springs orogeny. The fact that the Finke crosses them from side to side confirms that it is, at the very least, as old as they are.
These types of rivers are called antecedent rivers and they are extremely rare to see, because for them to exist, the land has to be incredibly stable for a very long time.
Australia, the perfect place to survive
For hundreds of millions of years, Australia has been one of the calmest continents on the planet, with hardly any earthquakes, no volcanoes and no glaciations.
And precisely because of that, the Finke has “survived”, because in other parts of the world, rivers just as old disappeared under glaciers, eruptions or climate changes themselves, but the Finke was lucky, or rather, it had the perfect context to survive.
An old man
This river seems vulnerable today, it is intermittent. When it does not rain much, it does not carry much water, sometimes barely any, but its course is still there and it continues to draw the Australian desert, even more incredible because it has managed to adapt to one of the most extreme environments on the planet and continue to exist.
Can it disappear?
Under natural conditions, a river like the Finke could remain there for millions more years, but climate change can compete with it. Rising temperatures and pressure on water resources create new threats against this river, which we should remember, has been on Earth for almost all of life itself.
A witness of the past
The Finke is the patriarch of the rivers of the Earth, and a direct witness of the deepest past of our planet, something that connects our present with a world that was completely different.
As long as it continues to shape the landscape, even if it only carries water from time to time, it will keep a title that is hard to beat! The oldest (and still living) river in the world, it is incredible!