PHILADELPHIA, March 22 (UPI) -- A team of U.S. physicists and geologists says it has taken a major step toward predicting where and how large floods occur on river deltas.
The University of Pennsylvania researchers say they created a miniature river delta that replicates river flooding patterns, resulting in a mathematical model capable of aiding in predicting catastrophic flood.
The goal of the study was to improve prediction of why and where such flooding occurs and to determine how the slow deposition of sediment within rivers eventually fills channels, forcing water to spill into surrounding areas and find a new, steeper path, the scientists said. The process is called avulsion.
Graduate student Meredith Reitz said the researchers injected a mixture of water and sediment into a bathtub-sized tank and documented the formation and avulsion of river channels as they built a three-foot-sized delta.
"Reducing the scale of the system allows us to speed up time," Reiz, one of the study's authors, said. "We can observe processes in the lab that we could never see in nature."
The results of the study -- led by Assistant Professor Douglas Jerolmacko, along with Associate Professor John Swenson of the University of Minnesota-Duluth -- appear in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
