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10: Landforms Carved by Rivers

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    Introduction 

    Huka Falls, a prominent set of waterfalls on the Waikato River near Taupo, New Zealand.
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\) : Huka Falls, a prominent set of waterfalls on the Waikato River near Taupo, New Zealand. (CC BY-NC 4.0 ; Mrinmoy Ghosh) 

    "Wild rivers are Earth's renegades, defying gravity, dancing to their own tunes, resisting the authority of humans, always chipping away, and eventually always winning."

    ~ Richard Bangs, River Gods ~

    Fluvial processes are those associated with the work of streams. Among all the various land forming agents, the work of running water is the most ubiquitous. Nearly every part of the Earth has seen, at sometime in its geologic past, the imprint of fluvial processes.

    Learning Objectives

    By the end of this chapter you should be able to:

    • Describe the features of a drainage basin.
    • Explain how the features of a drainage basin control runoff and discharge from streams in it.
    • Explain how drainage patterns within a drainage basin form.
    • Describe the factors that control and explain the processes of fluvial erosion, transportation, and deposition.
    • Describe channel geometry and explain its role in stream flow.
    • Describe to components of a hydrograph and explain the controlling factors over its shape.
      Explain how floods occur.
    • Compare and contrast the several types of deltas.
    • Identify fluvial landforms from a topographic map.
    • Describe the processes and feature formed from fluvial processes in dry regions.
    • Describe the impact of climate change on fluvial processes and landforms.

    This page titled 10: Landforms Carved by Rivers was last modified on Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:01:55 GMT and is shared under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Michael E. Ritter (The Physical Environment) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.