Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2023 April 15

= April 15 =

A river, a tributary, a peninsula, and a flood
I think this is a hydrology question? The picture shows the junction of a the Kern River and one of its tributary creeks in the Sierra Nevada in central California. The flow is north to south. The river and the creek run almost parallel for a while, and are separated by a peninsula which comes to a point at the junction of the creek and the river. When the flow of the river is sufficient, the peninsula is mostly submerged and the creek meets the river a ways upstream. The peninsula ends where I've marked the picture in black. Or, at least, it used to. During March's atmospheric river-caused floods, both the Kern and the creek got huge; the combined flow of the river and the creek was briefly 45,000 cubic feet per second (highest flow in 60 years), compared to about 700cfs the day before. When the water receded, to my surprise the peninsula had grown downstream about 100 feet, as marked in the picture in red. The new growth is indistinguishable from the rest of the peninsula, other than that nothing has tried to grow there yet. Sand and rocks. My question is: what's happening here? What makes a peninsula grow like this? --jpgordon&#x1d122;&#x1d106;&#x1D110;&#x1d107; 01:17, 15 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Chances are it's sediment that was deposited during the flooding events. A great deal of erosion would have occurred upstream and the rivers would have been flowing more quickly during the flooding events, resulting in higher sediment loading. The area just downstream from the tip of the peninsula would not have experienced as high of speeds as areas upstream, so insufficient mechanical energy would have been present there to prevent sediment deposition, resulting in the extension of the sand bar. As a general rule, streams have steeper gradients near their headwaters and erode more sediment than they deposit, while the reverse is true near the mouth. A gradient of sorts exists along the length of the stream: more erosion and higher speeds near the source, and more deposition and slower speeds near the mouth. This is why small tributary streams often have large boulders and cobbles along their banks (which require higher water velocities and more energy to stay entrained, and the lower reaches and deltas of rivers are characterized by fine-grained silt. Deltas are formed when the water from a stream slows as it enters a lake or ocean, and drops all of its sediment because the forward motion of the water is no longer sufficient to keep it entrained. The water where deltas are formed generally has lower velocities than any other part of the stream, so the finest-grained sediment is usually found in deltas. This phenomenon can also be observed on smaller scales: the bottom of the main channel of a large, fast-moving river will often contain large rocks up to around 20 cm in diameter, the beds of slower side channels might be sandy. This is the case for a lot of rivers I've seen in the Cascade Mountains of Washington, for example. — SamX &#91;talk · contribs · he/him&#93; 01:48, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
 * The speed drop at the deposition zone makes sense. Thanks! Good explainer. --jpgordon&#x1d122;&#x1d106;&#x1D110;&#x1d107; 05:32, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Whiteandblueniles.jpg Essentially this is a kind of bar (river morphology). These can form at a confluence when there is a difference between the merging watercourses in speed, sediment load, or other factors, as SamX has discussed. Eventually under the right conditions they can grow into a river island. This image of the confluence of the Blue and White Nile in Khartoum is a nice example. I presume that small island got gradually built up there from these processes. --47.155.46.15 (talk) 01:57, 16 April 2023 (UTC)