Hydrologic Cycle
The release of water vapor to the atmosphere by plants.
What is transpiration?
The technical name for the drop in elevation of a stream divided by the distance the water travels.
What is gradient?
Silt and clay-sized detrital grains make up the suspended loads of most of these?
What are rivers and streams?
At the head of a delta, the major channel splits into smaller channels that follow different paths to the sea; The smaller channels are known as this.
What is distributaries?
This is an abandoned, cutoff, meander loop of a stream.
What is an oxbow?
Sea level drops when water is stored in these disappearing solid masses (or what is left of them) predominantly found at the poles.
What are ice sheets and continental glaciers?
The volume of water flowing past a certain point in a given unit of time, usually cubic meters per second.
What is discharge?
This describes the total sediment load transported by a stream.
What is capacity?
This is both a depositional feature and essentially parallel to its stream channel.
What is a natural levee?
[insert video LZ "When the Levee Breaks"]
This is the world's largest river in terms of discharge.
Water evaporating from a lake, water infiltrating into soil and bedrock, and water moving into creeks and streams following a rainstorm, are all part of this.
What is the hydrologic cycle, the water cycle, or the hydrosphere?
Channel size and shape, laminar flow, and gradient are all factors that influence this.
What is stream velocity?
This two word term generally constitutes the highest percentage of the annual sediment load moved by a stream.
What is suspended load?
This stream pattern develops on lands underlain by alternating bands of resistant and less-resistant rock.
What is a trellis stream pattern?
What is downcutting?
More of this substance is evaporated from the ocean than is returned to the ocean by precipitation.
What is water?
Examining the profile of a typical river you would find the gradient is steepest near this?
What is the 'head' of the river?
This two word term is the single most important erosional agent.
What is running water?
This stream pattern is developed only on growing mountains like volcanoes or where the land surface is tectonically doming upward.
What is a radial stream pattern?
A stream begins at an elevation of 200 meters and flows a distance of 400 kilometers to the ocean. This is the average gradient in meters per kilometers.
What is 0.5 or one half m/km?
This component of the water cycle describes the recharge of water to the soil and groundwater systems.
What is infiltration?
The counterintuitive fact that even though the channel slope decreases toward a stream's mouth, the flow velocity does this.
What is increases?
This one word term refers to stream deposits, mainly sand and gravel?
What is alluvium?
This is the most common drainage pattern.
What is a dendritic pattern?
Permeable rock strata or sediment that transmit groundwater freely are called this.
What is an aquifer?