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Geographers have finally figured out why some rivers form single channels, while others divide into many interwoven threads. Their findings, published in the journal Science, could transform flood planning and river restoration efforts.
“The question of what causes a river to be single-threaded or multi-threaded is pretty much as old as the field of geomorphology,” says Associate Professor Vamsi Ganti, senior author of the study at the University of California Santa Barbara.
“We found that rivers will develop multiple channels if they erode their banks faster than they deposit sediment on their opposing banks,” adds lead author Dr Austin Chadwick. “This causes a channel to widen and divide over time.”
Ganti, Chadwick and co-author Dr Evan Greenberg tracked the erosion and deposition that occurred on the banks of 84 rivers around the world. They analysed 36 years (1985–2021) of global satellite imagery with an image-processing algorithm.
The algorithm, which was originally designed to track particle motion in laboratory photos of fluid, was adapted to track channel position in floodplains.
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