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This process by which the river changes course is known as avulsion, or delta-switching, and forms the variety of landscapes that make up the Mississippi River Delta. [ 7 ] The Atchafalaya River is the largest distributary of the Mississippi River and is also considered to be an influential part of the continual land-building processes within ...
A river delta is so named because the shape of the Nile Delta approximates the triangular uppercase Greek letter delta.The triangular shape of the Nile Delta was known to audiences of classical Athenian drama; the tragedy Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus refers to it as the "triangular Nilotic land", though not as a "delta". [8]
The shifting river delta at the mouth of the Mississippi on the Gulf Coast lies some 300 miles south of this area in Louisiana, and is referred to as the Mississippi River Delta. Rather, the Mississippi Delta is part of an alluvial plain , created by regular flooding of the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers over thousands of years.
Like other desert river deltas, such as the Nile Delta and the Indus River Delta, the Colorado River delta has been greatly altered by human activity. Decades of dam construction and water diversions in the United States and Mexico have reduced the delta to a remnant system of small wetlands and brackish mudflats. [ 6 ]
An 1850 drawing of the Sacramento River in the Delta, showing the lush foliage that made up much of the virgin Delta. Immediately before large-scale human development, most of the Delta islands had saucer-like cross sections, with low natural levees flanking a marshy interior "bowl" that flooded intermittently with the seasons and tides.
The hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius) (/ ˌ h ɪ p ə ˈ p ɒ t ə m ə s /; pl.: hippopotamuses; also shortened to hippo (pl.: hippos), further qualified as the common hippopotamus, Nile hippopotamus, or river hippopotamus, is a large semiaquatic mammal native to sub-Saharan Africa.
The Mobile–Tensaw River Delta is the largest river delta and wetland in Alabama. It encompasses approximately 260,000 acres (110,000 ha) in a 40-by-10-mile (64 km × 16 km) area and is the second largest delta in the contiguous United States . [ 1 ]
The Lena river delta in Russia is formed from the river's sediment. While rivers may flow into lakes or man-made features such as reservoirs, the water they contain will always tend to flow down toward the ocean. [3] However, if human activity siphons too much water away from a river for other uses, the riverbed may run dry before reaching the ...