South America by River
A continent cut along its ridges, not its borders
▶ Play it onlineThis is South America as water sees it, and it is lopsided in a way no political map shows. The Andes run so close to the Pacific that the whole western coast is a thin strip of short, steep rivers, while almost everything east of the mountains drains the long way, to the Atlantic or the Caribbean. The Amazon alone takes about a third of the continent. In the far north-west, squeezed between two ranges of the Andes, is a narrow piece called the Magdalena, which is where the descent to Barichara begins.
What a child works out
- The Andes decide where almost all of the continent's rain goes.
- A river's territory can be bigger than most countries.
- Some basins never reach the sea: Titicaca's water stays in the mountains.
A download, to print yourself
- A .3mf file with the colours already assigned
- One STL per piece, for any other slicer
- A print guide with the settings and the order to print in
- For your own use; the licence is in the download
What you need to print it
- A build plate that takes 176 × 250 mm: the Bambu Lab A1, P1S and X1C (256 mm) do, the A1 mini (180 mm) does not
- A multicolour setup such as an AMS, for the colours as designed
Printed it? Got an idea?
Send me photos of your print and I'll add them to this page — or tell me what you'd add, leave out or change on South America by River.
The plate
- Pieces
- 31 pieces
- Plate
- 176 × 250 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 32.8 km
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 19.79
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 104 mm²
- Fit
- 0.35 mm clearance
- Material
- PLA, printed in Switzerland
B5 — the size of a school exercise book.
How much ground one millimetre of plate covers.
Height is stretched by this factor so the relief is readable at desk size.
Nothing is cut smaller than a child can pick up.
Printed in place, so every piece seats first time without sanding.
Every named piece
- Amazon
- Atacama
- Bahia
- Caribbean Coast
- Central Chile
- Chocó and Ecuador
- Chubut
- Colorado
- Dulce
- Essequibo
- Guiana Coast
- Lagoa dos Patos
- Magdalena
- Marajó
- Maranhão
- Nordeste
- North Patagonia
- Orinoco
- Paraíba do Sul
- Paraná
- Paraná 2
- Parnaíba
- Patagonia
- Peru Coast
- Salado
- Salinas Grandes
- São Francisco
- Titicaca
- Tocantins
- Uruguay
- Uruguay 2
Zoom in, zoom out
A piece of each of these is the subject of the next one. Each plate is redrawn at its own scale, so it is a real map at every level rather than an enlargement of the one above.
Follow the water — The world to the creek below Barichara, cut by ridge lines
More from Watersheds
See all →
North America by River
A continent divided only by where water goes
No countries, no states. Twenty-nine pieces, each one the whole territory that drains into a single river.
- Pieces
- 29 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 49.4 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00
The Mississippi
The basin that drains a third of a continent
Fifteen pieces — Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, Red, Illinois — that together are about three million square kilometres of drainage.
- Pieces
- 13 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 14.5 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00
The Upper Mississippi
The river before the Missouri joins it
Twenty-one pieces — the Minnesota, the St Croix, the Wisconsin, the Des Moines, the Cedar — draining the northern half of the Mississippi.
- Pieces
- 16 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 4.7 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00