Meandering Rivers for Dummies

Floodplain of meandering river

Ever heard of starving artists? Sure you have: some company rents a hotel meeting room, where their rep sells hundreds of large paintings (some on black velvet, we think) that were supposedly pained by "starving artists." In reality, they're poor-quality reproductions of the work of mildly-talented amateurs churned out in a factory setting somewhere. We guarantee you will not find something by the next Wyeth or Picasso in the room. That's just like we (almost) guarantee that freelance rubbish written for eHow.com by "starving college students" will be poor-quality reproductions. Take, for example, Michael O. Smathers: the history student already demonstrated incompetence in electrical work, now he's back to suggest that he failed Rocks for Jocks with his version of  "Features of a Flood Plain [sic]" at Sciencing.com.

We're picking on Smathers today for two reasons: first, his obvious unfamiliarity with the topic and second, his lousy writing. We don't normally single out poor writing, but what the heck: we're in bad moods today. Here's what Mike had to say in his introduction:

"A flood plain is a type of geological feature that results when a river periodically overflows its banks due to rainfall, snow melt or other factors. Floodplains are initially formed due to the meandering course of a river gradually. "

Besides the sophomoric assumption that a floodplain is caused by periodic flooding (it's not), just WTF is that dangling "gradually" supposed to mean? But what the heck: lots of college students can't write for crap (though they sure can take pictures of their food...). Moving on to Smathers' misinformation...

"A meander occurs when a river alternates its direction of flow due to the downward slope of a valley.": No, you have the words in the wrong order Mike. Meandering begins where the valley starts to flatten out and the water flows more slowly. "Because valleys are V-shaped, this creates an alternating course for the river as it flows toward the ocean or sea.": We have no idea what this is supposed to mean, but it's definitely wrong. "Water flows more quickly on the inside edge of a bend than it does on the outside edge": You have that backward, Mikey: erosion takes place on the outside of a bend while deposition takes place on the inside. Think of race cars on a curved course: the inside lane is shorter, so the car on the outside has to move faster or lose ground. "Point bars consist of alluvium that has been swept or rolled into place by secondary water flow at the bottom of the river.": WTF does that mean, anyway? Even our staff sedimentologist didn't understand this crap Smathers reworded from a fifty year old fluid dynamics paper... "Natural levees form when a river periodically floods its bank and deposits coarse alluvium such as gravel onto the banks in progressively higher stages when the river spreads and slows down its flow. If the river is not flooding, alluvial deposits can settle on the riverbed, thus raising the river level. ": Scary thought... but the truth is pretty simple: when flood water leaves a river channel, it slows down (often due to baffling by plant growth) and drops its sediment load. Levees form at the edges of the channel where this first happens.

Smathers is clearly bamboozling his audience by throwing a bunch of disconnected and misinterpreted factoids at the page. Heaven help any poor high school earth science student who uses this bull to study for a test, no thanks to the Dumbass of the Day "starving college student" who penned it.

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