The Alligator Rivers is the name of a region in the Arnhem Land region of the Northern Territory of Australia, containing three rivers the East, West and South Alligator River. It is regarded as one of the richest biological regions in Australia with part of the region in the Kakadu National Park, and is an Important Bird Area (IBA) lying to the east of the Adelaide and Mary River Floodplains IBA. It also contains mineral deposits especially uranium with the Ranger Uranium Mine located there. The area is also rich in Australian Aboriginal art with 1500 sites. The Kakadu National Park is one of the few World Heritage sites on the list because of both its natural and human heritage values. They were explored by Lieutenant Phillip Parker King in 1820 who named them in the mistaken belief that the crocodiles in the estuaries were alligators.
Read more about Alligator Rivers: Rivers, Climate, Wildlife, Aboriginal Heritage
Famous quotes containing the words alligator and/or rivers:
“Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)