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Why Rivers Curve Instead of Flowing Straight

Rivers almost never take the shortest path across the landscape. Instead of flowing straight downhill, they curve, migrate, and slowly reshape the land around them. In this video, we explore why that happens. By looking at how water moves through a channel, how friction and momentum interact, and how erosion and deposition reinforce each other over time, we uncover the physical logic behind meandering rivers. What appears at first glance to be inefficiency or randomness turns out to be a stable and energy-balanced response to gravity, sediment, and slope. We also examine how small disturbances grow into large curves, why rivers migrate across floodplains, and how extreme bends can eventually be cut off to form oxbow lakes. Together, these processes reveal that curved river channels are not accidents, but a natural outcome of flowing water trying to manage its energy over long periods of time. This is a calm, visual, and narrative exploration of fluvial geomorphology—focused on understanding how rivers work, not just what they look like.