River Meandering as a Self-Organization Process

Abstract

Simulations of freely meandering rivers and empirical data show that the meandering process self-organizes the river morphology, or planform, into a critical state characterized by fractal geometry. The meandering process oscillates in space and time between a state in which the river planform is ordered and one in which it is chaotic. Clusters of river cutoffs tend to cause a transition between these two states and to force the system into stationary fluctuations around the critical state.