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The effects of a river flood in the city of Paris.
One of the most intriguing cases of a river with a 'memory' is the Seine in Paris. Its original meandering route was altered by engineers to accommodate the city's needs. However the Seine never forgot and once in a while it angrily floods entire neighborhoods trying to reclaim its old path, creating havoc and much distress among Parisians.
The following article by Science Daily explains how geological features can retain a memory of their ancient shapes, giving clues to their history. A group of mathematicians used hard candy material in an experiment to replicate erosion of surfaces and to discover under what conditions landforms remember their original shapes or forget about them.
"Candy in water may seem like a far cry from geology, but there are in fact whole landscapes carved from minerals dissolving in water, their shapes revealed later when the water table recedes. Caves, sinkholes, stone pillars and other types of craggy terrain are born this way," explained one of the scientists.
How landscapes and landforms 'remember' or 'forget' their initial formations
"Candy in water may seem like a far cry from geology, but there are in fact whole landscapes carved from minerals dissolving in water, their shapes revealed later when the water table recedes. Caves, sinkholes, stone pillars and other types of craggy terrain are born this way," explained one of the scientists.
How landscapes and landforms 'remember' or 'forget' their initial formations
New laboratory findings point to what affects the development of nature's shapes.
Crescent dunes and meandering rivers can 'forget' their initial shapes as they are carved and reshaped by wind and water while other landforms keep a memory of their past shape, suggests a new laboratory analysis by a team of mathematicians.
"Asking how these natural sculptures come to be is more than mere curiosity because locked in their shapes are clues to the history of an environment," explains Leif Ristroph, an assistant professor at New York University's Courant Institute and the senior author of the paper, which appears in the journal Physical Review Fluids.
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