A river just 74 kilometres long ranks fourth in Europe for flow
The Neva runs only 74 kilometres from Lake Ladoga, the lake's single outlet, to Neva Bay on the Gulf of Finland. Yet it moves more water than almost any river in Europe, links canal routes toward the Volga and the White Sea, and carries Saint Petersburg's history on its banks.
Short as it is, the Neva carries more water on average than any European river except the Volga, the Danube and the Rhine, roughly 2,500 cubic metres a second. Because Lake Ladoga releases water evenly through the year, spring floods are almost unknown, and the river drops only 4.27 metres from source to mouth. Its narrowest point, 210 metres, comes at the Ivanovo rapids where it crosses a moraine ridge, and its greatest depth, 24 metres, lies above the Liteyny Bridge.
Finnic languages supply cognates for the name: Finnish “poor fen,” Karelian “watercourse,” Estonian nõva “waterway.” Some link it to an Indo-European word for new, since the river is geologically young. After the ice retreated, land near Ladoga rebounded faster than elsewhere, briefly damming a lake that eventually spilled west through the Mga valley into the Tosna channel, cutting the Ivanovo rapids; recent research dates that breakthrough to between 1410 and 1250 BC.
History crowds its banks. Between the eighth and thirteenth centuries it formed part of the trade route from Scandinavia to Byzantium, and on 15 July 1240 the 20-year-old Prince Alexander Yaroslavich beat a Swedish army where the Izhora joins it, earning the name Nevsky. Saint Petersburg was founded on the swampy delta in 1703; by the late nineteenth century the delta held 101 islands, but filled-in canals left just 42 by 1972, Vasilyevsky the largest.
The city has logged more than 300 floods, driven mostly by surges from Neva Bay; the worst, on 7 November 1824, raised water 421 centimetres above the gauge. The river is officially rated heavily polluted, receiving some 80,000 tonnes of pollutants a year and more than 40 oil spills, and in 2008 no Neva beach was judged fit for swimming, though wastewater treatment in the city climbed from 74 percent in 1997 to nearly 92 percent by 2008.
Source: Neva
