Meander in the context of "River"

A floodplain or flood plain or bottomlands is an area of land adjacent to a river. Floodplains stretch from the banks of a river channel to the base of the enclosing valley, and experience flooding during periods of high discharge. The soils usually consist of clays, silts, sands, and gravels deposited during floods.

Because of regular flooding, floodplains frequently have high soil fertility since nutrients are deposited with the flood waters. This can encourage farming; some important agricultural regions, such as the Nile and Mississippi river basins, heavily exploit floodplains. Agricultural and urban regions have developed near or on floodplains to take advantage of the rich soil and freshwater. However, the risk of inundation has led to increasing efforts to control flooding.

An alluvial plain is a plain (an essentially flat landform) created by the deposition of sediment over a long period by one or more rivers coming from highland regions, from which alluvial soil forms. A floodplain is part of the process, being the smaller area over which the rivers flood at a particular time. In contrast, the alluvial plain is the larger area representing the region over which the floodplains have shifted over geological time.

As the highlands erode due to weathering and water flow, the sediment from the hills is transported to the lower plain. Various creeks will carry the water further to a river, lake, bay, or ocean. As the sediments are deposited during flood conditions in the floodplain of a creek, the elevation of the floodplain will be raised. As this reduces the channel floodwater capacity, the creek will, over time, seek new, lower paths, forming a meander (a curved path). The leftover higher locations, typically natural levees at the margins of the flood channel, will be eroded by lateral stream erosion, local rainfall, and possibly wind transport if the climate is arid and does not support soil-holding grasses. These processes, over geologic time, will form the plain, a region with little relief (local changes in elevation) yet with a constant but slight slope.

The Büyük Menderes River ("Great Meander", historically the Maeander or Meander, from Ancient Greek: Μαίανδρος, Maíandros; Turkish: Büyük Menderes Irmağı), is a river in southwestern Turkey. It rises in west central Turkey near Dinar before flowing west through the Büyük Menderes graben until reaching the Aegean Sea in the proximity of the ancient Ionian city Miletus. The river was well known for its sinuous, curving pattern, and gives its name to the common term, (meander), used to describe these characteristic bends in rivers.

A river island is any exposed landmass surrounded by river water. Properly defined, it excludes shoals between seasonally varying flows and may exclude semi-coastal islands in river deltas such as Marajó.

These islands result from changes in the course of a river. Such changes may be caused by interactions with a tributary, or by the opposing fluvial actions of deposition and/or erosion that form a natural cut and meander. Nascent vegetation-free shoals and mudflats may dissipate and shift or build up into such islands through deposition; the process may be assisted through artificial reinforcement or natural factors, such as reeds, palms, evergreen trees or willows, that act as obstacles or erosion barriers, so that water flows around them. Islands may be small or large, covering many square kilometers, examples of which are given below.

Stream capture, river capture, river piracy or stream piracy is a geomorphological phenomenon occurring when a stream or river drainage system or watershed is diverted from its own bed, and flows down to the bed of a neighbouring stream. This can happen for several reasons, including:

• Tectonic earth movements, where the slope of the land changes, and the stream is tipped out of its former course
• Natural damming, such as by a landslide or ice sheet
• Erosion, either
  • Headward erosion of one stream valley upwards into another, or
  • Lateral erosion of a meander through the higher ground dividing the adjacent streams.
  • Within an area of karst topography, where streams may sink, or flow underground (a sinking or losing stream) and then reappear in a nearby stream valley
• Glacier retreat

A pattern is a regularity in the world, in human-made design, or in abstract ideas. As such, the elements of a pattern repeat in a predictable and logical manner. There exists countless kinds of unclassified patterns, present in everyday nature, fashion, many artistic areas, as well as a connection with mathematics. A geometric pattern is a type of pattern formed of repeating geometric shapes and typically repeated like a wallpaper design.

Any of the senses may directly observe patterns. Conversely, abstract patterns in science, mathematics, or language may be observable only by analysis. Direct observation in practice means seeing visual patterns, which are widespread in nature and in art. Visual patterns in nature are often chaotic, rarely exactly repeating, and often involve fractals. Natural patterns include spirals, meanders, waves, foams, tilings, cracks, and those created by symmetries of rotation and reflection. Patterns have an underlying mathematical structure; indeed, mathematics can be seen as the search for regularities, and the output of any function is a mathematical pattern. Similarly in the sciences, theories explain and predict regularities in the world.