 Rivers are responsible for most sediment transport. They take the weathered rock from the highlands and transport it to the lowlands and into the ocean. They do most of the work to even out topography on earth that's created by tectonic processes. So we usually think of river as the river channel itself. The deposits associated with rivers also include the sediment on the banks and levees and overbank or flood plain deposits. And much of the sediment transport in rivers occurs during the peak flows when the flow speed is fastest and the water is deepest, the vent is the highest and the transport capacity in the river channels is highest. However, even at the lower flows in drier times, they transport a significant amount of sediment. So there are a number of things that control the geometry of the river and those include things like the type of sediment that's present and the slope and the amount of water flow. And those processes also influence the geometry of the river. So there are several different geometries or types of rivers. One that's quite rare is a straight channel. In nature, there are almost always irregularities that cause a channel to deviate from being straight. But a lot of times when we build cities around rivers and then want to control the rivers to keep from flooding our cities, we force the channels to be straight. So for example, the rivers that run through Los Angeles that are all in cement lined channels that are mostly straight. Second type that is very common in mountains are braided rivers. And these are rivers that have a bunch of channels next to each other. And so these areas that I'm passing would be the bars with the water flowing between them with the channels merging and separating quite often. So they're sort of interwoven together with the bars in between. And braided rivers form when there is a lot of bed load sediment that stays on the bed to create those bars. A third type of meandering rivers. And these are usually single channeled and the channels themselves curve and meander back and forth. So here's our braided river channel. Our meandering river channel would look something like this with the flow here and the flood plain out here. So meandering rivers are very common once most of the bed load is deposited. And to get these meanders you have to have a very low slope. If you have a steep slope the river will just tend to go straight down. And there's a fourth type called anastomosing. And anastomosing rivers are very much like meandering rivers except that they have multiple channels here. So in this particular case you might have a meandering channel that comes like this and then maybe it splits into two. And then sometimes those channels come back together. So this would be the part with the water flow. And anastomosing channels, anastomosing rivers are really common when the slope is very, very flat. Like for example the top of a delta. And so there's very little slope to drive the flow in a single direction and it's really just the water pressure itself that's driving the flow from the top and to the bottom. Thanks for watching.