What is the geography of the Ohio River Valley?
By Sophia Dalton
What is the geography of the Ohio River Valley?
The Ohio River drains into a fertile basin that measures 203,000 square miles (528,101 square kilometers)—stretching across Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky. The river is formed by the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
What is the Ohio River valley known for?
Our Rich History: The Ohio River Valley was the epicenter of a major global war. The Ohio River Valley, with Newport, Kentucky at nearly its halfway point, was an epicenter of a major global war that changed the course of British and American history.
What geographical significance did the Ohio River serve?
During the 1600s and 1700s, the Ohio River served as the southern border of what later came to be called the Northwest Territory. In several treaties, the river also served as a dividing line between British settlements in Kentucky and American Indian communities in the Ohio Country.
What are the four geographic regions of WV?
Generally, it is divided into four geographical regions: Ohio River Valley, Allegheny Plateau, Allegheny Highlands, and Potomac Section.
What are the boundaries of the Ohio Valley?
“Loosely defined it includes a good portion of Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, extreme southwestern Pennsylvania, extreme northwestern West Virginia, and down to the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers,” Gelber says.
How does the Ohio River flow?
Formed by the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers at Pittsburgh, it flows northwest out of Pennsylvania, then in a general southwesterly direction to join the Mississippi River at Cairo, Illinois (see photograph), after a course of 981 miles (1,579 km). …
How dirty is the Ohio River?
This river provides drinking water for three million inhabitants of the United States. It is, however, considered to be the most polluted river in the United States. The river is believed to have somewhere around 20 million pounds of toxic discharge.
How old is the Ohio River?
between 2.5 and 3 million years ago
The Ohio River is young from a geologic standpoint. The river formed on a piecemeal basis beginning between 2.5 and 3 million years ago. The earliest Ice Ages occurred at this time and dammed portions of north flowing rivers.
What does the Ohio Valley consist of?
“Loosely defined it includes a good portion of Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, extreme southwestern Pennsylvania, extreme northwestern West Virginia, and down to the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers,” Gelber says. A map of the Ohio River (Black) and it’s basin. A lot of this area is where “The Ohio Valley” is.
What land area does the Ohio River drain?
203,940 square miles
The watershed drainage area of the Ohio River Basin, excluding the Tennessee River Basin, includes parts of Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. The total drainage area for the Ohio River Basin is 203,940 square miles.
What geographic region is West Virginia in?
Appalachian Mountain region
West Virginia is called the Mountain State because it’s the only state completely within the Appalachian Mountain region, and its average elevation is higher than any other state east of the Mississippi River!
What is West Virginia geography?
West Virginia’s landscape is characterized into 3 major provinces: The Allegheny plateau in the west and north, the Allegheny Mountains, which run from the southwest through the northeast, and the Ridge and Valley province, east of the Allegheny Front (the continental divide) along West Virginia’s eastern border with …
