River landforms, human impact & flood management
Travel down a river's long profile and meet the landforms that moving water actually builds — waterfalls and gorges, rapids, bluffs and river cliffs, point bars and slip-off slopes, floodplains, levees, alluvial fans and deltas. Then we study how people change a river's catchment through deforestation, afforestation, urbanisation, abstraction and water storage, and how those changes raise or lower flood peaks. We work through the causes and effects of river floods, compare soft engineering (that works with nature) against hard engineering (that controls by force), and finish with a full Namibian case study — the Zambezi Region floods, once called the Caprivi — judging honestly which flood-management methods really worked.
By the end you should be able to (NSSCAS Geography (AS) 1.3b):
- describe and explain the formation of gorges, rapids, waterfalls, bluffs, river cliffs, point bars/slip-off slopes, floodplains, levees, alluvial fans, deltas
- describe and explain the human impact to catchment flows and stores and channel flows by land-use changes (deforestation, afforestation, urbanisation), abstraction and water storage
- describe the causes and effects of river flood
- discuss flood management techniques with reference to forecasts and warnings, soft engineering (floodplain and drainage basin management, wetland and river bank conservation and river restoration) and hard engineering (dams, river straightening, levees and diversion spillways)