This report is also available as a pdf.
The Yukon River, located in northwestern Canada and central Alaska, drains an area of more than 330,000 square miles, making it the fourth largest drainage basin in North America. Approximately 126,000 people live in this basin and 10 percent of these people maintain a subsistence lifestyle, depending on the basinís fish and game resources. Twenty ecoregions compose the Yukon River Basin, which indicates the large diversity of natural features of the watershed, such as climate, soils, permafrost, and geology.
Although the annual mean discharge of the Yukon River near its mouth is more than 200,000 cubic feet per second, most of the flow occurs in the summer months from snowmelt, rainfall, and glacial melt. Eight major rivers flow into the Yukon River. Two of these rivers, the Tanana River and the White River, are glacier-fed rivers and together account for 29 percent of the total water flow of the Yukon. Two others, the Porcupine River and the Koyukuk River, are underlain by continuous permafrost and drain larger areas than the Tanana and the White, but together contribute only 22 percent of the total water flow in the Yukon.
At its mouth, the Yukon River transports about 60 million tons of suspended sediment annually into the Bering Sea. However, an estimated 20 million tons annually is deposited on flood plains and in braided reaches of the river. The waters of the main stem of the Yukon River and its tributaries are predominantly calcium magnesium bicarbonate waters with specific conductances generally less than 400 microsiemens per centimeter. Water quality of the Yukon River Basin varies temporally between summer and winter. Water quality also varies spatially among ecoregions.
Purpose and Scope
Description and History of the Yukon River Basin
The Yukon River and its Major Tributaries
Exploration of the Yukon River Basin
People and Land
Environmental Characteristics of the Yukon River Basin
Hydrologic Characteristics of the Yukon River Basin
Snow and Ice
Sources of Sediment
Relation Between Suspended-Sediment Concentration and Water Discharge
Storage of Sediment
Yukon River Main Stem
Temporal Variations in Water Quality
Spatial Variations in Water Quality
Anthropogenic Effects on Water Quality
This report is available online in Portable Document Format (PDF). If you do not have the Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader, it is available for free download from Adobe Systems Incorporated.
Download the Report (PDF, 6.3 MB).
Document Accessibility: Adobe Systems Incorporated has information about PDFs and the visually impaired. This information provides tools to help make PDF files accessible. These tools convert Adobe PDF documents into HTML or ASCII text, which then can be read by a number of common screen-reading programs that synthesize text as audible speech. In addition, an accessible version of Acrobat Reader 5.0 for Windows (English only), which contains support for screen readers, is available. These tools and the accessible reader may be obtained free from Adobe at Adobe Access.
For more information about water resources in Alaska is available on the World Wide Web at http://ak.water.usgs.gov.
|AccessibilityFOIAPrivacyPolicies and Notices|
|U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey
Persistent URL: http://pubs.water.usgs.gov/wri994204
Page Contact Information: GS Pubs Web Contact
Last modified: Thursday, September 01 2005, 02:25:38 PM