Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
As rivers flow downstream, they eventually merge to form larger rivers. A river that feeds into another is a tributary, and the place they meet is a confluence. [4] Rivers must flow to lower altitudes due to gravity. [3] The bed of a river is typically within a river valley between hills or mountains.
In physical geography and hydrology, a channel is a landform on which a relatively narrow body of water is situated, such as a river, river delta or strait. While channel typically refers to a natural formation, the cognate term canal denotes a similar artificial structure.
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 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 ...
Dendritic drainage: the Yarlung Tsangpo River, Tibet, seen from space: snow cover has melted in the valley system. In geomorphology, drainage systems, also known as river systems, are the patterns formed by the streams, rivers, and lakes in a particular drainage basin. They are governed by the topography of land, whether a particular region is ...
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 ...
River mouth of the Júcar, Cullera. A river mouth is where a river flows into a larger body of water, such as another river, a lake/reservoir, a bay/gulf, a sea, or an ocean. [1] At the river mouth, sediments are often deposited due to the slowing of the current, reducing the carrying capacity of the water. [1]