WATER ON EARTH
Lakes, streams, glaciers, groundwater, oceans, and the atmosphere.
What are places where water is found at or near Earth’s surface?
Friction with the bed and banks and irregularities in the channel shape.
What causes turbulence in streams?
A river cannot cut deeper than this point, located at the elevation of its mouth.
What is base level?
A lake formed when a meander neck is cut through by erosion.
What is an oxbow lake?
Sediment deposited directly next to a stream channel during flooding.
What is a natural levee?
The cycle driven by evaporation, condensation, precipitation, infiltration, transpiration, runoff, and groundwater movement.
What is the hydrologic cycle?
The reason peak stream discharge usually occurs sometime after rainfall.
What is the lag time needed for runoff to travel through the drainage system?
Dissolved load, suspended load, and bed load.
What are the three ways streams carry their sediment load?
A wandering single channel vs. multiple smaller channels separated by bars and islands.
What is the difference between meandering and braided streams?
Human methods to reduce flood damage include artificial levees, dams, retention basins, and zoning restrictions.
What are ways humans manage or mitigate flood risks?
The source of energy that drives evaporation and ultimately the hydrologic cycle.
What is the Sun?
The reason large, deep streams often move faster than small, rocky mountain streams.
What is less friction and turbulence in wide, smooth channels?
The factor that most strongly influences the shape of a river delta.
What are the nature and strength of the water currents that deposit sediments?
Flooding occurs when stream discharge exceeds this.
What is the capacity of the stream channel?
A delta grows outward when this current is the strongest influence.
What is the river’s own current (as in the Mississippi River delta)?
DAILY DOUBLE
This process in the hydrologic cycle returns water vapor from plants back into the atmosphere.
This term describes the total amount of water flowing past a point in a stream over a given period of time.
What is stream discharge?
These two factors work together to control the shape and long-term evolution of a river delta.
What are shoreline shape and the nature of the depositing currents?
These features form on the inside of meander bends where water slows down and deposits sediment.
What are point bars.
DAILY DOUBLE
Urbanization increases flood risk mainly because it reduces these two processes that normally allow water to soak into the ground.