Hume Dam
Hume Dam the Hume Weir, is a major dam across the Murray River downstream of its junction with the Mitta River in the Riverina region of New South Wales, Australia. The dam's purpose includes flood mitigation, hydro-power, water supply and conservation; the impounded reservoir is called Lake Hume the Hume Reservoir. It is a gated concrete gravity dam with four earth embankments and twenty-nine vertical undershot gated concrete overflow spillways. Constructed over a 17-year period between 1919 and 1936, the Hume Dam is located 11 kilometres east of the city of Albury; the dam was built, involving a workforce of thousands, by a consortium of NSW and Victorian government agencies that included the Water Resources Commission of New South Wales, the Public Works Department of New South Wales, the State Rivers and Water Supply Commission of Victoria. Supplies to the construction site were delivered via rail, through the construction of a branch siding from the Wodonga - Cudgewa railway. Hume Dam is jointly managed by Victorian and New South Wales authorities on behalf of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority.
Goulburn-Murray Water manages water and land located in Victoria, the New South Wales State Water Corporation is responsible for day-to-day operation and maintenance and the management of major remedial works at the dam. The dam is a mix of a concrete gravity dam with four earth embankments; the dam wall height is 51 metres and the crest is 1,615 metres long with the auxiliary embankments extending a further 1,010 metres. The maximum water depth is 40 metres and at 100% capacity the dam wall holds back 3,005,157 megalitres of water at 192 metres AHD; the surface area of Lake Hume is 20,190 hectares and the catchment area is 15,300 square kilometres. The dam wall is constructed of rock covered with clay and other earth and is designed to carry vehicular traffic. A controlled concrete spillway that comprises a gated concrete overflow, with twenty-nine vertical undershot gates, is capable of discharging 7,929 cubic metres per second. Water is retained nearly 40 kilometres upstream of the reservoir in the valleys of both the Murray and Mitta Mitta rivers.
The dam wall was extended during the 1950s, completed in 1961, necessitating the wholesale removal of Tallangatta township and its re-establishment at a new site 8 kilometres west of the original, as well as railway and road diversions. Monitoring of the dam in the early 1990s revealed that the water pressure and leakage had caused the dam to move on its foundations leading to concerns that the dam was heading for collapse, threatening Albury-Wodonga and the entire Murray basin. Authorities denied any short-term threat. Traffic was banned from the spillway, remedial work commenced involving, in part, the construction of a secondary earth wall behind the original to take the strain. Further upgrades to the dam at an estimated cost of A$60 million commenced in 2010 and are due for completion in 2015; these works include the installation of an improved filter and drainage system on the junction between the concrete spillway and southern embankment, construction of a concrete buttress on the southern training wall, possible modifications to improve the ability of the dam to manage extreme floods.
The Hume Power Station is a 58 megawatts hydro-electric power station installed in the dam wall, is used for peak-load generation. The station has an average annual output of 220 gigawatt-hours; the power station is operated by Eraring Energy. In October 2012, a high voltage transformer at the power station caught fire, requiring more than fifty fire fighters who worked into the long hours of the night to put out the blaze; the power station was completed in 1957. In 2000, these turbines were each upgraded to 29 megawatts. Named the Mitta Mitta Dam site, following representations from the Municipal Council of Albury, on 17 February 1920 the River Murray Commission decided to honour Hamilton Hume, who, in company with William Hovell, was one of the first Europeans to see and cross the Murray River in 1824. In 1920, the reservoir was named the Hume Reservoir and the dam adopted the name of the Hume Weir, the name given by the Victorian Place Names Committee. Following a proposal from Hume Shire Council, in 1996 both the NSW and Victorian governments agreed that the dam should be named the Hume Dam, the reservoir be named Lake Hume.
Lake Hume is estimated to hold six times the volume of water in Sydney Harbour. The small towns of Tallangatta and Bellbridge are located on the shores of Lake Hume; the reservoir is referred to as the Hume Weir, only named Lake Hume in the mid-1980s. Lake Hume is the furthest upstream of the major reservoirs on the Murray River system and has the capacity to release water at the fastest rate. Irrigation authorities used the reservoir as the storage of first resort; the reservoir falls to less than one-third capacity by March each year, but in normal years refills to at least two-thirds capacity before November, though Australia's unpredictable climatic conditions cause these figures to vary quite from year to year. In 2007 Lake Hume fell to 1% capacity more than the water in the Murray and Mitta Mitta rivers flowing through on their original paths. Between 2010 and April 2013, the lowest storage level was in the range of 500,000 megalitres; the lake is stocked with fish. Most of these are introduced species - carp and trout though native species such as Golden
Dartmouth, Victoria
Dartmouth is a town in Victoria, Australia. It was established in 1973 as a construction camp for workers working on the Dartmouth Dam and the Post Office opened on 1 March 1973.. The dam was built close to the mouth of the Dart river where it joined the Mitta Mitta river and is a major reservoir in the Murray-Darling River system, on the Mitta Mitta River. Today Dartmouth is a village with a permanent population around 45 people, it caters to fisherman and local workers who maintain the dam and the now two power stations. While the dam was being built by the SR&WSC of Victoria the population was around 2000, many of those people were employed by Thiess Bros
Victorian Alps
The Victorian Alps, an extensive mountain range that forms the southern part of the Australian Alps located in the Australian state of Victoria, is part of the Great Dividing Range, an Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia sub-bioregion of 519,866 hectares, an administrative sub-region bordering the Gippsland and Hume regions. Comprising the Bogong High Plains, Bowen Range, Cathedral Range, Cobberas Range, numerous other smaller ranges, the Victorian Alps include the Alpine Shire, parts of the East Gippsland Shire, some parts of the Mansfield Shire local government areas; the alps are sometimes called the High Plains or High Country, The highest peak in the range is Mount Bogong at an elevation of 1,986 metres AHD, the highest peak in Victoria. Geography of Victoria Regions of Victoria
Australia
Australia the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area; the neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea and East Timor to the north. The population of 25 million is urbanised and concentrated on the eastern seaboard. Australia's capital is Canberra, its largest city is Sydney; the country's other major metropolitan areas are Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians for about 60,000 years before the first British settlement in the late 18th century, it is documented. After the European exploration of the continent by Dutch explorers in 1606, who named it New Holland, Australia's eastern half was claimed by Great Britain in 1770 and settled through penal transportation to the colony of New South Wales from 26 January 1788, a date which became Australia's national day; the population grew in subsequent decades, by the 1850s most of the continent had been explored and an additional five self-governing crown colonies established.
On 1 January 1901, the six colonies federated. Australia has since maintained a stable liberal democratic political system that functions as a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy, comprising six states and ten territories. Being the oldest and driest inhabited continent, with the least fertile soils, Australia has a landmass of 7,617,930 square kilometres. A megadiverse country, its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes, with deserts in the centre, tropical rainforests in the north-east and mountain ranges in the south-east. A gold rush began in Australia in the early 1850s, its population density, 2.8 inhabitants per square kilometre, remains among the lowest in the world. Australia generates its income from various sources including mining-related exports, telecommunications and manufacturing. Indigenous Australian rock art is the oldest and richest in the world, dating as far back as 60,000 years and spread across hundreds of thousands of sites. Australia is a developed country, with the world's 14th-largest economy.
It has a high-income economy, with the world's tenth-highest per capita income. It is a regional power, has the world's 13th-highest military expenditure. Australia has the world's ninth-largest immigrant population, with immigrants accounting for 26% of the population. Having the third-highest human development index and the eighth-highest ranked democracy globally, the country ranks in quality of life, education, economic freedom, civil liberties and political rights, with all its major cities faring well in global comparative livability surveys. Australia is a member of the United Nations, G20, Commonwealth of Nations, ANZUS, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, World Trade Organization, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, Pacific Islands Forum and the ASEAN Plus Six mechanism; the name Australia is derived from the Latin Terra Australis, a name used for a hypothetical continent in the Southern Hemisphere since ancient times. When Europeans first began visiting and mapping Australia in the 17th century, the name Terra Australis was applied to the new territories.
Until the early 19th century, Australia was best known as "New Holland", a name first applied by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1644 and subsequently anglicised. Terra Australis still saw occasional usage, such as in scientific texts; the name Australia was popularised by the explorer Matthew Flinders, who said it was "more agreeable to the ear, an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth". The first time that Australia appears to have been used was in April 1817, when Governor Lachlan Macquarie acknowledged the receipt of Flinders' charts of Australia from Lord Bathurst. In December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office. In 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known by that name; the first official published use of the new name came with the publication in 1830 of The Australia Directory by the Hydrographic Office. Colloquial names for Australia include "Oz" and "the Land Down Under". Other epithets include "the Great Southern Land", "the Lucky Country", "the Sunburnt Country", "the Wide Brown Land".
The latter two both derive from Dorothea Mackellar's 1908 poem "My Country". Human habitation of the Australian continent is estimated to have begun around 65,000 to 70,000 years ago, with the migration of people by land bridges and short sea-crossings from what is now Southeast Asia; these first inhabitants were the ancestors of modern Indigenous Australians. Aboriginal Australian culture is one of the oldest continual civilisations on earth. At the time of first European contact, most Indigenous Australians were hunter-gatherers with complex economies and societies. Recent archaeological finds suggest. Indigenous Australians have an oral culture with spiritual values based on reverence for the land and a belief in the Dreamtime; the Torres Strait Islanders, ethnically Melanesian, obtained their livelihood from seasonal horticulture and the resources of their reefs and seas. The northern coasts and waters of Australia were visited s
Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia
The Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia is a biogeographic regionalisation of Australia developed by the Australian Government's Department of Sustainability, Water and Communities. It was developed for use as a planning tool, for example for the establishment of a National Reserve System. Within the broadest scale, Australia is a major part of the Australasia biogeographic realm, as developed by the World Wide Fund for Nature. Based on this system, the world is split into 14 terrestrial habitats of which eight are shared by Australia; the Australian land mass is divided into 419 subregions. Each region is a land area made up of a group of interacting ecosystems that are repeated in similar form across the landscape; the most recent version is IBRA7, developed during 2012, which replaced IBRA6.1. This is a list of region and subregions under IBRA7. Region codes are given in parentheses. Images of regions are from IBRA6.1, pending creation of maps for IBRA7. Ecoregions in Australia Integrated Marine and Coastal Regionalisation of Australia "Australia's bioregions".
Department of Sustainability, Water and Communities. Commonwealth of Australia. 2012. Retrieved 13 January 2013. Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia regions and codes. Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia subregions and codes
River mouth
A river mouth is the part of a river where the river debouches into another river, a lake, a reservoir, a sea, or an ocean. The water from a river can enter the receiving body in a variety of different ways; the motion of a river is influenced by the relative density of the river compared to the receiving water, the rotation of the earth, any ambient motion in the receiving water, such as tides or seiches. If the river water has a higher density than the surface of the receiving water, the river water will plunge below the surface; the river water will either form an underflow or an interflow within the lake. However, if the river water is lighter than the receiving water, as is the case when fresh river water flows into the sea, the river water will float along the surface of the receiving water as an overflow. Alongside these advective transports, inflowing water will diffuse. At the mouth of a river, the change in flow condition can cause the river to drop any sediment it is carrying; this sediment deposition can generate a variety of landforms, such as deltas, sand bars and tie channels.
Many places in the United Kingdom take their names from their positions at the mouths of rivers, such as Plymouth and Great Yarmouth. Confluence River delta Estuary Liman
Murray River
The Murray River is Australia's longest river, at 2,508 kilometres in length. The Murray rises in the Australian Alps, draining the western side of Australia's highest mountains, meanders across Australia's inland plains, forming the border between the states of New South Wales and Victoria as it flows to the northwest into South Australia, it turns south at Morgan for its final 315 kilometres. The water of the Murray flows through several terminal lakes that fluctuate in salinity including Lake Alexandrina and The Coorong before emptying through the Murray Mouth into the southeastern portion of the Indian Ocean referenced on Australian maps as the Southern Ocean, near Goolwa. Despite discharging considerable volumes of water at times before the advent of largescale river regulation, the mouth has always been comparatively small and shallow; as of 2010, the Murray River system receives 58 percent of its natural flow. It is Australia's most important irrigated region, it is known as the food bowl of the nation.
The Murray River forms part of the 3,750 km long combined Murray–Darling river system which drains most of inland Victoria, New South Wales, southern Queensland. Overall the catchment area is one seventh of Australia's total land mass; the Murray carries only a small fraction of the water of comparably-sized rivers in other parts of the world, with a great annual variability of its flow. In its natural state it has been known to dry up during extreme droughts, although, rare, with only two or three instances of this occurring since official record keeping began; the Murray River makes up most of the border between the Australian states of Victoria and New South Wales. Where it does, the border is the top of the bank of the Victorian side of the river; this was determined in a 1980 ruling by the High Court of Australia, which settled the question as to which state had jurisdiction in the unlawful death of a man, fishing by the river's edge on the Victorian side of the river. This boundary definition can be ambiguous, since the river changes its course over time, some of the river banks have been modified.
West of the line of longitude 141°E, the river continues as the border between Victoria and South Australia for 11 km, where this is the only stretch where a state border runs down the middle of the river. This was due to a miscalculation during the 1840s, when the border was surveyed. Past this point, the Murray River is within the state of South Australia; the following major settlements are located along the course of the river, with population figures from the 2011 Census: The Murray River support a variety of river life adapted to its vagaries. This includes a variety of native fish such as the famous Murray cod, trout cod, golden perch, Macquarie perch, silver perch, eel-tailed catfish, Australian smelt, western carp gudgeon, other aquatic species like the Murray short-necked turtle, Murray River crayfish, broad-clawed yabbies, the large clawed Macrobrachium shrimp, as well as aquatic species more distributed through southeastern Australia such as common longnecked turtles, common yabbies, the small claw-less paratya shrimp, water rats, platypus.
The Murray River supports fringing corridors and forests of the river red gum. The health of the Murray River has declined since European settlement due to river regulation, much of its aquatic life including native fish are now declining, rare or endangered. Recent extreme droughts have put significant stress on river red gum forests, with mounting concern over their long-term survival; the Murray has flooded on occasion, the most significant of, the flood of 1956, which inundated many towns on the lower Murray and which lasted for up to six months. Introduced fish species such as carp, weather loach, redfin perch, brown trout, rainbow trout have had serious negative effects on native fish, while carp have contributed to environmental degradation of the Murray River and tributaries by destroying aquatic plants and permanently raising turbidity. In some segments of the Murray River, carp have become the only species found. Between 2.5 and 0.5 million years ago the Murray River terminated in a vast freshwater lake called Lake Bungunnia.
Lake Bungunnia was formed by earth movements that blocked the Murray River near Swan Reach during this period. At its maximum extent Lake Bungunnia covered 33,000 km2, extending to near the Menindee Lakes in the north and to near Boundary Bend on the Murray in the south; the draining of Lake Bungunnia occurred 600,000 years ago. Deep clays deposited by the lake. Higher rainfall would have been required to keep such a lake full. A species of Neoceratodus lungfish existed in Lake Bungunnia; the noted Barmah Red Gum Forests owe their existence to the Cadell Fault. About 25,000 years ago, displacement occurred along the Cadell fault, raising the eastern edge of the fault, which runs north-south, 8 to 12 m above the floodplain; this created a complex series of events. A section of the original Murray River channel immediately
Media related to Mitta Mitta River at Wikimedia Commons
