The World’s ten largest rivers drain 17% of the total land area of the Earth and deliver around 1/3 of the sediment that reaches the oceans.
Despite their importance, our knowledge of the morphology, fluid dynamics, sediment transport mechanics and sedimentology of large rivers is wholly inadequate. Evidence is now emerging that the dominant processes and deposits of large rivers may be fundamentally different to those of small rivers and may therefore be different to currently accepted wisdom.
Lead researchers
Project funded by
Project partners
CECOAL
ExxonMobil
FICH
Fulcrum Graphic Communications Inc.
INALI
RESON
Durham University
University of Birmingham
University of Brighton
University of Illinois
University of Southampton
A multi-disciplinary, international team working in collaboration with industry and local partners investigated one of the World's largest rivers, the Paraná-Paraguay in Argentina, to understand: (1) what controls water and sediment movement and river channel changes over time; and (2) what this means for the formation and preservation of river sedimentary deposits.
It used: (1) Single and multibeam echosounding and acoustic Doppler current profiling to map river bed morphology and its evolution through time, and measure the three-dimensional patterns of water and sediment movement around and over channel bars; (2) Ground Penetrating Radar to map the three-dimensional sedimentary structure of braid-bar deposits, both within the current river and in formerly active areas that have been abandoned over the past few thousand years; and (3) Coupled depth-integrated physically-based and reduced-complexity numerical models to determine channel evolution and deposit sedimentology over periods of centuries to millennia.
This project generated the World's first comprehensive database on how the morphology of a large river changes through time, obtained concurrently with data on what drives those changes and what this means for the formation of sedimentary deposits.
THYME Project Education Resources for Schools, Colleges and Community Groups
This project explores the evolution of flood risk on the Mekong Delta in Vietnam.
The University of Hull’s Energy and Environment Institute carried out research as part of the IMMERSE project that focused on challenges and threats facing estuaries
The University of Hull and National Youth Theatre collaboration for COP26
Developing the bioeconomy across Yorkshire and the Humber region and the Tees Valley
The University of Hull’s Energy and Environment Institute worked with the Environment Agency to test the public's response to cell broadcast emergency alert messages
Investigating the journey of plastics along the Mekong and its ultimate fate in the world’s oceans
Exploring children’s experiences of flooding through the use of immersive 360 technologies
THYME Project research into energy from biowaste
This project aims to identify the location and size of hedgerow gaps within East Yorkshire, which will establish a baseline value of the potential space for plantation.
Collaborative research as part of the THYME Project testing membranes as a potential low carbon replacement for distillation in the production of biofuels
Grassroots activity in the East Yorkshire bioeconomy
The STELAR team wished to build new insights into how morphodynamic processes interact with climate to modulate sediment transfer from source to sink.
Energy and Environment Institute at COP26
A multidisciplinary, holistic approach to the plastics problem.
The Hedgehunters are young citizen scientists assisting the EEI Mapping Hedgerow Gaps project
Understanding lived experiences of children and young people in the face of coastal change.
EEI Plastics Researcher Julie Hope urges you to make key plastic-free swaps to save our oceans
The University is one of 24 partners in the HYDRALAB network, using experimental models to improve predictions of how our rivers, estuaries and coasts will be affected by environmental change.
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