Gilo River Explained

Gilo River
Map:Sobat OSM.png
Mouth Coordinates:8.1416°N 33.192°W
Other Name:Mene, Owis, Bako
Subdivision Type1:Country
Subdivision Name1:Ethiopia
Subdivision Type2:Regions
Subdivision Name2:Gambela, Oromia, SWEPR
Source1 Coordinates:7.3516°N 35.7082°W
Mouth:Pibor River
Length:[1]
Discharge1 Location:Mouth
Progression:PiborSobatWhite NileNileMediterranean Sea
River System:Nile
Basin Population:1,050,000[2]
Source Confluence Coordinates:7.1193°N 35.2994°W

The Gilo River is a river in the Gambela Region of southwestern Ethiopia. A variety of names also knows it: the Gimira of Dizu call it the "Mene", while the Gemira of Chako call it "Owis", and Amhara and Oromo settlers in the early 20th century knew it by a third name, "Bako".[3] From its source in the Ethiopian Highlands near Mizan Teferi it flows to the west, through Lake Tata to join the Pibor River on Ethiopia's border with Sudan.[4] The combined waters then join the Sobat River and the White Nile.[5]

The Gilo River flows mainly through the Baro Salient, a portion of Ethiopia that juts westward into Sudan. The river valley was subjected to much prospecting for gold before World War II and in the 1950s, but not enough was found to make commercial extraction viable.[6]

Burchard Heinrich Jessen, who was part of W.N. McMillan's expedition that traveled through this part of southwestern Ethiopia in 1904, estimated its length at 200 miles and noted that at flood the width of the Gilo reaches 80 to 100 yards, with a depth of about 20 feet. Jessen further wrote that at the time of his visit:

See also

Notes and References

  1. Lehner . Bernhard . Verdin . Kristine . Jarvis . Andy . 2008-03-04 . New Global Hydrography Derived From Spaceborne Elevation Data . Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union . 89 . 10 . 93–94 . 10.1029/2008eo100001 . 0096-3941.
  2. Liu, L., Cao, X., Li, S., & Jie, N. (2023). GlobPOP: A 31-year (1990-2020) global gridded population dataset generated by cluster analysis and statistical learning (1.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10088105
  3. George Montandon, "A Journey in South-Western Abyssinia", Geographical Journal, 40, (1912),p. 379
  4. As Oscar Rudolph Neumann reports, having followed the Gilo from its source west as far as this lake. (Neumann, "From the Somali Coast through Southern Ethiopian to Sudan", Geographical Journal, 20 [October 1902], pp. 373-398.)
  5. Book: Shinn, David H. . Thomas P. Ofcansky . Historical Dictionary of Ethiopia . 2004 . Scarecrow Press . 0-8108-4910-0 . 360–361.
    online at Google Books
  6. http://130.238.24.99/library/resources/dossiers/local_history_of_ethiopia/g/ORTGIA.pdf "Local History in Ethiopia"