Green River

The Green River is a 730 mi (1, 170 km) long river located in the western U.S. states of Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado. The chief tributary of the Colorado River, its watershed, the Green River Basin, begins in the Wind River Range of Wyoming and flows through Wyoming and Utah for most of its course, except for a short segment of 40 miles (64 km) in western Colorado. Much of the route traverses the arid Colorado Plateau, where the river has carved some of the most spectacular canyons in the United States. The Green is slightly smaller than Colorado when the two rivers merge, but typically carries a larger load of silt. The average yearly mean flow of the river at Green River, Utah, is 6,121 cubic feet (173.3 m3) per second. The status of the Green River as a tributary of the Colorado River came about mainly for political reasons. In earlier nomenclature, the Colorado River began at its confluence with the Green River. Above the confluence, the Colorado was called the Grand River. In 1921, U.S. Representative Edward T. Taylor of Colorado petitioned the Congressional Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce to change the name of the Grand River to the Colorado River. On July 25, 1921, President Warren G. Harding signed House Joint Resolution 32 doing so, over the objections of the congressional delegations of the states of Wyoming and Utah and the United States Geological Survey, which noted that the drainage basin of the Green River was more extensive than that of the Grand R

Flows through: United States.

River data from Wikidata (CC0); lengths normalised to a common unit.