River Meandering

Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Water Resources Monograph Series, Volume 12.

River channel pattern comes in three flavors: straight, meandering, and braided. Of these, meandering is perhaps the most common, but at the same time the most mysterious: it is strikingly rich in pattern, yet is encumbered with neither the sterile order of its straight cousin, nor the undecipherable disorder of its braided relative.

Consider Figures 1 and 2 herein. The former is of the artificially straightened Naka River, Shikoku, Japan. Thwarted in its quest for a meandering planform, the river has, nevertheless, generated of its own the precursor known as alternate bars. In the latter photograph, a pair of images of the East Nishnabotna River, Iowa, USA, illustrate the elegance of the sinuous river, and the inexorable migration and deformation of bends so characteristic of freely meandering streams.