Source Rivers are rarely the calm, orderly streams we imagine on maps. Over time, their winding paths—called meanders—shift, bend, and occasionally snap off in sudden “cutoff” events that shorten loops and reshape the landscape. While scientists have long suspected that such cutoffs inject a dose of unpredictability into river evolution, a new study published in Communications Earth & Environment demonstrates that these abrupt events are, by themselves, enough to produce chaos in river channels. Mathematical models showed that a small perturbation in a river’s initial condition could create exponential divergence in its shape over time. I love the abstract quality of the result. The old nature vs art seesaw.
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