Meander Pattern Example

Meandering Streamflows: Patterns and Processes across Landscapes and Scales

Meandering patterns shaped by fluid flows are found over a broad range of landscapes, from bedrock channels to rivers and estuaries, deep-marine environments, supraglacial streams and other planets such as Mars and Venus. During the last six decades, meanders have been widely investigated by researchers from different fields, such as fluid mechanics, geomorphology, ecology, civil- and petroleum engineering, and geology. This volume seeks to push the science of meandering forward by bringing together insights gained from field, laboratory and numerical investigations of meandering streams found in distinct environmental and geological contexts. The authors pay particular attention to the interactions between autogenic and allogenic processes that affect meander kinematics and the resulting morphology, sedimentology and stratigraphic architecture. The findings presented in this volume contribute to a better understanding of stream meandering in diverse settings, with broad implications for stream and wetland restoration, land management, infrastructure design, oil exploration and production, carbon sequestration, hazard mitigation and planetary palaeoenvironmental reconstructions.

Handbook for Predicting Stream Meander Migration

Theoretical Morphodynamics: River Meandering

This monograph discusses the mechanics of Meandering Rivers with the help of the mathematical and modeling tools built up in the previous monograph of the same Authors (monograph 1 of the present series). After introducing the reader to the ubiquitous character of meandering streams, we discuss the hydrodynamics of curved channels with fixed beds and banks. Next, we extend the analysis to account for the mobile character of the bed and show that it gives rise to the alternate sequence of riffles and pools that characterize river meanders. Allowing for the erodible character of the river banks then allows to build up a rational theory of meander formation able to explain most of the features observed in nature: meander growth, migration, skewing, multiple loops, cutoffs and meander belts.