The Cranberry Tree

A look at a channel

Look at the above picture, what do you see?  The shapes of water stream is telling you a story. On the right side of the watershed, the stream is relatively straight while on the left, the stream is very loopy.  When you see straight stream morphology, this is where the water moves fast.  The headwaters from the escarpment have a high gradient/slope and the soils are highly erodible with under-developed topsoil layers. Moving to the left of the picture, the river is showing sinuosity (the looping of the river).  At this point, the river is slow.  The gradient of the land is very flat.  To illustrate this more at Mountain, the elevation drops 22 ft/mile and by Hoople, the elevation drop of 2 ½ ft/mile.

Posted at 09:34AM Mar 24, 2009 by Lesley Lubenow in Aquatics  |  Comments[0]