Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The degree of meandering of the channel of a river, stream, or other watercourse is measured by its sinuosity. The sinuosity of a watercourse is the ratio of the length of the channel to the straight line down-valley distance. Streams or rivers with a single channel and sinuosities of 1.5 or more are defined as meandering streams or rivers. [1] [3]
On the outer bends of a river, where water is flowing fastest, the river will erode away the land between adjacent outer bends and cause them to become close to each other; this leads to their intersection. [6] Chute cutoff: a channel cuts directly across the land bypassing an entire meandering loop in the river and abandoning it. [6]
Cut bank – Outside bank of a water channel, which is continually undergoing erosion; Fluvial processes – Sediment processes associated with rivers and streams; Helicoidal flow – Cork-screw-like flow of water in a meander; Oxbow lake – U-shaped lake or pool left by an ancient river meander
A point bar is an area of deposition typically found in meandering rivers. Point bars form on the inside of meander bends in meandering rivers. As the flow moves around the inside of the bend in the river, the water slows down because of the shallow flow and low shear stresses there reduce the amount of material that can be carried there.
The world average river reach slope is 2.6 m/km or 0.26%; [2] a slope smaller than 1% and greater than 4% is considered gentle and steep, respectively. [3] Stream gradient may change along the stream course. An average gradient can be defined, known as the relief ratio, which gives the average drop in elevation per unit length of river. [4]
Meandering streams with relatively coarse bed load tend to develop a riffle-pool sequence with pools in the outsides of the bends and riffles in the crossovers between one meander to the next on the opposite margin of the stream. The pools are areas of active erosion and the material eroded tends to be deposited in the riffle areas between them.
1.50 ≤ SI: meandering It has been claimed that river shapes are governed by a self-organizing system that causes their average sinuosity (measured in terms of the source-to-mouth distance, not channel length) to be π , [ 3 ] but this has not been borne out by later studies, which found an average value less than 2.
A wide variety of river and stream channel types exist in limnology, the study of inland waters.All these can be divided into two groups by using the water-flow gradient as either low gradient channels for streams or rivers with less than two percent (2%) flow gradient, or high gradient channels for those with greater than a 2% gradient.