River Meandering as a Self-Organization Process
Abstract
Simulations of freely meandering rivers and empirical data show that the meandering process self-organizes the river morphology, or planform, into a critical state characterized by fractal geometry. The meandering process oscillates in space and time between a state in which the river planform is ordered and one in which it is chaotic. Clusters of river cutoffs tend to cause a transition between these two states and to force the system into stationary fluctuations around the critical state.
- Publication:
-
Science
- Pub Date:
- March 1996
- DOI:
- 10.1126/science.271.5256.1710
- Bibcode:
- 1996Sci...271.1710S