I was watching PBS as someone was reporting from the “3-way watershed” point for the Continental Divide. Water would flow from one side of the mountain into the Atlantic, one side into the Pacific, and one side into the Arctic Ocean.
Are there any places where 4 bodies of water are fed?
Where is the 3-way for Atlantic, Pacific, Carribean?
Would Mount Everest be at the center of 4 watersheds?
I don’t think a 4way exists. a 3way happens naturally when one watershed intersects another. You’d need 3 watersheds to intersect at the same exact location to form a 4way, so it would almost have to be an artificial construct or a tremendous co-incidence. But I’m no expert on this. anyone else?
I’m pretty sure that the Carribean is bounded by Cuba on the north. Cuba may have have a 3-way divide into the Gulf of Mexico, the Carribean and the Straits of Florida, but no North American water drains into the Carribean.
The Mississippi drains into the Gulf of Mexico. Considering how far north and how broad the headwaters are, I doubt that any point flows to the Pacific, Gulf and the Atlantic.
Also, I think the Missippi is considered as draining into the Atlantic through the Gulf.
This is, of course, the informal abbreviation for… oh, you know…
Re: Atlantic-Pacific-Caribbean-- there may be such a point in the Andes mountains in South America, but it depends somewhat on what you define the boundaries of the Caribbean to be. The Caribbean is really just an arm of the Atlantic. If you include the Gulf of Mexico with the Caribbean, then the watershed of the Caribbean would include the entire Missippi River basin (roughly from the Rockies to the Appalachians and from the Gulf to the Canadian border, excluding the area immediately surrounding the Great Lakes.) It would also include Texas and most of New Mexico, most or all of Alabama, and the dividing line with the Atlantic would probably run right down the Florida Peninsula (though that would be subject to interpretation.)
Eureka! I just looked at an old National Geographic map insert (Nov 1993) on “Water.” It has a little map dividing North America into drainage basins. It has the Pacific and Arctic oceans by themselves, but the Atlantic side of the continent is divided into Hudson Bay, Atlantic, and Gulf of Mexico. The western boundary of the three Atlantic parts and the Arctic section runs, of course, down the Continental Divide (call this Line 0) from Alaska down through the Rockies to Panama. I’ll try to describe where the dividing lines for the other sections go:
the 3-ocean point you heard described is in the Canadian rockies on the Alberta-B.C. border, From there a line (1) runs northeast towards Baffin Island, which is the big island that covers the entrance to Hudson Bay. North of this line and east of line 0 is the Arctic Ocean drainage basin. The next line (2)runs from about where the Continental Divide intersects the US-Canadian border and runs east towards northern Minnesota, skirts around to the north of Lake Nipigon, and runs across Ontario and Quebec to intersect the sea at the northern tip of Labrador. Everything between this line and line 1 is in the Hudson Bay basin. Another line (3) runs from near the source of the Mississippi River in northern Minnesota down to Chicago, over to Buffalo, down the Appalachians to northern Georgia, and straight down to the Florida everglades. Everything east of this line and south of line 2 is in the Atlantic basin. Everything else (west of line 3, east of line 0, south of line 2) drains to the Gulf of Mexico.
From this map, it appears there is no 4-way point. If you include Hudson Bay with the Atlantic, Atlantic-Pacific-Arctic meet at one point and Atlantic-Pacific-Gulf meet at another point. these points are about 300 miles apart. The former is in Jasper Natl. Park in Alberta (or is it Banff NP??) The latter is probably inside Glacier National Park in Montana.
See? A picture really is worth a thousand words. 
Oh, as for your Mt. Everest question: Remember that the height of a mountain doesn’t necessarily mean it is a watershed divide. Look carefully at a map of Colorado and you’ll see what I mean. Conversely, in many places you can barely tell you’re crossing a watershed-- for instance, the Continental Divide in southern New Mexico.
Isn’t there a bit of a problem here with the arbitrariness of boundaries between the oceans? Is the Gulf of Mexico part of the Atlantic? Where is the boundary between the Caribbean and the Atlantic? Where is the boundary between the Arctic and the Atlantic? Between the Arctic and the Pacific?
If you ignore the arbitrary nature of boundaries between bodies of water and adopt compass directions (admittedly, also a construct, but based on objective standards of celestial sightings, earth’s magnetic field and so on), then I would think most continents would have four-way divides. for North America, for example, there is the Mackenzie River (north), the St. Lawrence (east), the Mississippi (south) and the Columbia (west).
jti, you’re right that the boundary lines of oceans are often subject to interpretation, but I think the OP was asking if there was a single point on the continent where four drainage basins meet. For example, the Mackenzie and Mississippi basins do not touch each other, so there can be no point that divides those two basins. And the St. Lawrence and Columbia basins don’t touch each other either.
The intersection of the two main continental divides is usually given as Triple Divide Peak, in Glacier National Park, Montana.
And the Atlantic-Pacific-Arctic intersection is at the prosaically-named Snow Dome, in the middle of the Columbia Icefield, on the Alberta-BC border, and also on the border between Jasper and Banff National Parks (both in Alberta).
Jasper N.P. is entirely within the Arctic drainage basin; Banff N.P. is entirely within the ‘Atlantic’ drainage basin (although I’m hesitant to lump Hudson Bay into the Atlantic; it’s arguably an extension of the Arctic Ocean more than of the Atlantic). There is no corresponding park on the B.C. side, which is of course entirely in the Pacific Ocean drainage basin (although not all of B.C. is).
there is to my knowledge a 4-way watershed in Switzerland.
to the south the river TICINO flows into the river PO which flows into the ADRIATIC SEA
to the west the river RHONE flows into the MEDITERRANEAN SEA
to the north the river AARE flows into the RHINE which flows into the NORTH SEA
to the east the river RHINE (see above)
there is at 50km further east the river INN flowing into the DANUBE flowing into the BLACK SEA
so it’s really a 4 1/2 watershed 
shouldn’t you guys be looking at islands instead of continents?
ok, the andes. the northern part breeds the magdalena river that flows northwards to the western carribean. just below the equator, the amazon system merges eastwards to the atlantic. farther south, the western branch of the parana system is partly fed by andes snow and the main river empties south into the atlantic at rio de la plata. west of the andes, small chilean rivers empty into the pacific.
thanks for reviving this 10 year old thread, zombie1!
“In Switzerland”, maybe, but I doubt it’s all at one point. I suspect that if you looked at the map closely enough, you’d find that there are actually two triple-divide points very close to each other.
There’s a similar issue with rivers. One can often find the statement that the Missouri river forms from the confluence of the Madison, Jefferson, and Gallatin Rivers, all coming together at once. But really, the Madison and Jefferson join at one point, and then less than a mile later, the Gallatin comes in. It’s a matter of some ambiguity where exactly the Missouri starts, at the first confluence or the second (IIRC, this has some bearing on whether the State of Montana or the Federal government is responsible for maintaining the parklands surrounding that short stretch).
tried to look at updated geology books. they’re all called streams, from the trickle in front of your house to the amazon. i don’t think standards for naming and measurements exist to this day. safest to call the amazon, mississippi, and nile as river systems. in fact, the guiness declines to say which is longer, the amazon or the nile, because there just isn’t any good way to measure it.
Again, not a single point, but there is a relatively small area in Wyoming that is drained by at least 4 distinct watersheds. In the area south of the Grand Tetons, at various points water flows to the Atlantic and the Pacific, but also into the Great Salt Lake and the Wyoming Basin, which are both internally-drained (i.e. have no outlets).
This region also has the very bizarre Two Ocean Creek, which is a single creek that flows into a swamp on the continental divide which is in turn drained by two creeks, each of which flow to a separate ocean.
For a mind blower, check out how many states are at least partly drained by the Ohio River.
There’s something like that in Yellowstone, too, at Lake Isa (really more of a small marshy pond). It sits right on the Divide and has a trickle of drainage (as in, you could step over it) each way.
Which I suppose, if you think about it, technically makes the region of North America between the two an island.
Aren’t the last two the same? If I’ve understood the concepts being discussed in this thread, your example is really a 3-way watershed (Adriatic, Mediterranean and North Sea).
Well as the zombie says the source of the Inn (flowing into the Black Sea) is some distance to the east. (Close to St. Moritz in the Grisons according to Wikipedia.) But yes, it’s not one four-way watershed, just two three-way ones that are relatively close to each other. And it’d probably be the case even if we considered the Aar and Rhine drainage basins as separate.