3 Interesting Maps of the Week – Part 6

03. Countries with no rivers

Click for higher resolution

Countries without rivers:

Sovereign states

• Bahamas
• Bahrain
• Comoros
• Kiribati
• Kuwait
• Maldives
• Malta
• Marshall Islands
• Monaco
• Nauru
• Oman
• Qatar
• Saudi Arabia
• Tonga
• Tuvalu
• UAE
• Vatican City
• Yemen

Dependencies and other territories

• Anguilla
• Bermuda
• British Indian Ocean Territory
• Cayman Islands
• Christmas Island
• Cocos (Keeling) Islands
• Easter Island
• Gibraltar
• Niue
• Norfolk Island
• Pitcairn Islands
• Saint Barthélemy
• Saint Martin
• Tokelau
• Wallis and Futuna

On zooming on to bigger map, you will find all of these to be painted red. The map does not take in account temporary rivers. On the map above you will Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar to be visibly on the red. Oman does not have any perennial rivers but it does have small wadis- shallow watercourse (pic below) that are found in the Hajar Mountains.

Waids are seasonal and dependent on when it rains.

The underground aqueducts of the Arabian peninsula are engineering miracles. They dig wells straight down into the aquifers and then carve out the aqueduct into the nearby village. Each well is a few hundred feet apart and up to a hundred feet down, and then clay “huts” are built on top of them which serve two purposes: they keep sunlight off the aqueduct so it stays cool, and they also catch the wind and draw it down into the aqueduct. Back at the village, a homeowner only needs to dig a vent into the aqueduct from their basement, and all that wind cooled from the miles of underground waterway, flows right into their home. So all natural air conditioning in the middle of one of the driest, hottest places on earth. They’ve been doing this for centuries.