What is the average width of the rio grande river

Texan mayors opposed to a planned border fence with Mexico want to widen and deepen the Rio Grande river instead, and say it will be more effective in keeping out illegal immigrants. The U. Mayors say it would also damage trade and centuries-old ties with Mexico.

The calm brown waters of the Rio Grande, famed in Western movies and cowboy ballads, have marked the Texan border with Mexico since the 19th century.

Six mayors in mainly Hispanic south Texas on the Mexico border call the fence a wall of shame and have vowed to take the federal government to court to block its construction. They say a wider, deeper waterway along the lower Rio Grande would create a more formidable barrier than a fence that immigrants can cut, climb over and tunnel under. Water supply within the Rio Grande drainage is dwindling. The International Boundary and Water Commission was forced to lease irrigation water to grow cottonwood trees for habitat restoration along the riverbank below Elephant Butte Dam in central New Mexico.

Increasingly frequent droughts in the face of climate change and growing populations around Albuquerque and El Paso could exacerbate the problem.

The U. Bureau of Reclamation estimates the upper Rio Grande watershed will collect 30 percent less water by the end of the century, as annual snowpacks shrink and evaporation rates increase. Reduced to just 5 percent of its former range by dams and diversions, it survives only in the middle section of the river, near Albuquerque. The last minnow may soon be driven from the river by the growing demand for water in the face of drought. The Rio Grande flows through seven states, three U.

S states, and four Mexican states. The river rising as a clear, snow-fed mountain stream more than 3, meters 12, feet above sea level in the Rocky Mountains. Its early course follows a canyon through forests of spruce, fir, and aspen into the broad San Luis Valley in Colorado, after which it cuts the Rio Grande Gorge and White Rock Canyon of northern New Mexico and enters the open terrain of the Basin and Range and Mexican Plateau physiographic provinces.

Along the remainder of its course the river wanders sluggishly across the Gulf Coastal Plain to end in a fertile delta where it joins the Gulf of Mexico. The drainage basin or watershed of the Rio Grande encompasses , square kilometers , square miles.

Approximately half of the entire watershed is in Mexico, and half lies within the United States. In some places the depth of the river has varied from about 18 meters 60 feet to a bare trickle or nothing. The average discharge is 68 cubic meters 2, cubic feet per second. This river has quite a history, and even today, it has a big impact on the people living near it.