Rivers drain all but the most arid areas of the earth through channels that are regulated by physical laws that impose on them certain forms. The ideal form is rarely encountered in practice and represents an end point to which geographic process tend. In general a river may be divided into two principal zones, the steep and fast flowing rhithron upstream and the sluggish and flat potamon downstream. While conditions in an individual system are highly variable along its length, similar reaches of different rivers differ much less even between continents and at different latitudes. All continents have a series of major river systems which consist not only of the river channels but also the swamps, lakes and seasonally flooded lands associated with them.