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Long-lived river systems can produce a series of terrace surfaces over the course of their geologic lifetime. When rivers flood, sediment deposits in sheets across the floodplain and build up over time. Later, during a time of river erosion, this sediment is cut into, or incised, by the river and flushed downstream. The previous floodplain is ...
Fluvial processes form several channel patterns, including: Straight, which are found in the most tectonically incised/active areas. This is more of a hypothetical end-member, and are not often found in nature. Straight-type channels can be found at alluvial fans.
The amount of matter carried by a large river is enormous. It has been estimated that the Mississippi River annually carries 406 million tons of sediment to the sea, [5] the Yellow River 796 million tons, and the Po River in Italy 67 million tons. [6] The names of many rivers derive from the color that the transported matter gives the water.
The terms river morphology and its synonym stream morphology are used to describe the shapes of river channels and how they change in shape and direction over time. The morphology of a river channel is a function of a number of processes and environmental conditions, including the composition and erodibility of the bed and banks (e.g., sand, clay, bedrock); erosion comes from the power and ...
The diagram also shows how human water use impacts where water is stored and how it moves. [ 1 ] The water cycle (or hydrologic cycle or hydrological cycle) is a biogeochemical cycle that involves the continuous movement of water on, above and below the surface of the Earth .
Watershed delineation is the process of identifying the boundary of a watershed, also referred to as a catchment, drainage basin, or river basin.It is an important step in many areas of environmental science, engineering, and management, for example to study flooding, aquatic habitat, or water pollution.
In geomorphology a river is said to be rejuvenated when it is eroding the landscape in response to a lowering of its base level. The process is often a result of a sudden fall in sea level or the rise of land. The disturbance enables a rise in the river's gravitational potential energy change per unit distance, increasing its riverbed erosion rate.
A diagram of a possible river with the Strahler number of each tributary labeled. In hydrology , a stream order is a positive integer used to describe the level of river branching in a drainage basin. [ 18 ]