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Geosciences LibreTexts

5: Rivers

  • Page ID
    13473
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    • 5.1: Introduction
      Rivers are the major pathways by which this excess water flows to the ocean also could say as the routes by which the products of weathering on the continents are carried to the oceans. There are several basic characteristics of rivers.
    • 5.2: Fluvial Hydrology
      This included Measurement of Streamflow and Hydrographs
    • 5.3: Open-Channel Hydraulics
      This would a good place to go back and review the material on open-channel flows in Chapter 1. Recall that in open-channel flows the presence of the free surface means that the geometry of the flow can change in the flow direction not just by being constrained to do so by the geometry of the boundaries but also by the behavior of the flow itself.
    • 5.4: The Energy of Rivers
      The content of this section is a little less grandiose than the title would suggest. I would like to introduce some basic ideas about the energetics of rivers and then supply a calculation to show how much energy is actually expended by a representative large river.
    • 5.5: The Morphology of Rivers
      I’ll defer a description of the plan- form features of the river (that is, what you would see from the air, above the river) until later.
    • 5.6: Classifying Rivers
      Rivers are varied in so many ways that you should expect complexity in classification.
    • 5.7: Variables Involved In Rivers
      Think about the variables that describe the characteristics and behavior of rivers. These fall into the broad categories of flow, sediment, geometry, and other.
    • 5.8: Fluvial Sediment Transport
      This section is a brief account of the nature of sediment transport in rivers.
    • 5.9: Morphology and Dynamics of Meandering Streams
      The two most characteristic plan patterns assumed by rivers are meandering and braided. First of all, keep in mind that the tendencies toward meandering and braiding are complementary rather than mutually exclusive, in the sense that many rivers show elements of both at the same time and within the same reach.
    • 5.10: Drainage Networks
      The drainage network of a drainage basin is the collection of all of the channels in a given drainage basin: the main stream, often called the trunk stream, and all of the tributaries, as well as the tributaries of tributaries, and so on.
    • 5.11: Fluvial Deposits
      Fluvial deposits are an important part of the ancient sedimentary record. The reason why is not obvious; after all, rivers drain areas of the continents that are undergoing erosion.
    • 5.12: Floods
      Here’s a simple definition of a river flood: the occurrence of a flow of such magnitude that it overtops the natural or artificial banks in a reach of river channel. If a floodplain exists, here’s another way of defining a flood: any flow that spreads out over the floodplain.
    • 5.13: Some Practical Aspects of Rivers

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    This page titled 5: Rivers is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by John Southard (MIT OpenCourseware) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.