Energy and Environment Institute Our story Our work Our people Contact us More Back Completed projects Paraná-Paraguay The Challenge 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. The Approach 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. The Impact 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. Other completed research projects View all projects Completed project COHBED COHBED takes advantage of the latest technologies to produce information about the growth, movement and stability of bedforms that consist of natural mixtures of sands and muds. Completed project Columbia TIFZ This project used integrated field measurements and mathematical modelling techniques to achieve a step-change in our understanding of the TIFZ in the Columbia River estuary. Completed project Bedforms in unsteady flows This project combined laboratory experiments at the Total Environment Simulator with repeat detailed field surveys of bathymetry and flow on the Mississippi River. Completed project STELAR-S2S The STELAR team wished to build new insights into how morphodynamic processes interact with climate to modulate sediment transfer from source to sink. Top Browser does not support script. Browser does not support script. Browser does not support script. Browser does not support script. Browser does not support script.