riverrun... from swerve of shore to bend of bay

April 15, 2016 7:29 PM

Rivers through time, as seen in Landsat images. "Thanks to the Landsat program and Google Earth Engine, it is possible now to explore how the surface of the Earth has been changing through the last thirty years or so. Besides the obvious issues of interest, like changes in vegetation, the spread of cities, and the melting of glaciers, it is also possible to look at how rivers change their courses through time."
posted by storybored (8 comments total)

Very cool! It's easy to forget that streams and rivers (along with most other natural features) are dynamic, self-regulating systems. And despite their immense power, they are surprisingly delicate. They are the equilibrated, balanced products of sediment supply, tectonic uplift, bedrock geometry, precipitation, etc... Unfortunately, dams and levees tend to stop sediment from getting deposited along a floodplain, which in some areas (e.g. New Orleans) is causing the land around the delta to sink. Not good when you're worried about the next big flood. But cities always spring up next to rivers, and the inconvenient thing about living on a floodplain is that it wants to flood.
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 8:10 PM on April 15, 2016

Related: 1944 Mississippi River meander maps
posted by Thorzdad at 9:18 PM on April 15, 2016

Beautiful!
posted by brambleboy at 11:48 PM on April 15, 2016

How Wolves Change Rivers
posted by kokaku at 2:16 AM on April 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

The animation is great, and I hope someone takes the time to create a bunch more for other river systems.
posted by Dip Flash at 3:44 AM on April 16, 2016

Related: Lidar mapping of the Willamette river in Oregon
posted by dhruva at 10:06 AM on April 16, 2016

It was interesting to see the thread-like cut-across channel on the upper bow, and then one developed on the lower bow, and when the bows finally touched those two cut-across channels rapidly [sic] grew into the main channel, but in the transition period there was a moment during which all the possible channels seemed to have about equal amounts of water in them, but presumably unequal flow.
posted by jamjam at 12:49 PM on April 16, 2016

Hey, neat! I wondered if this was possible like 5 years ago.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 1:32 PM on April 16, 2016