Why Are Rivers So Mathematical? “Any stream, from the littlest brook to the mightiest river, has a length that’s proportional to its drainage area raised to the power of 0.6.”
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Comments 1
It’s a fascinating natural occurrence. I read the article and agree it’s likely explained by the least amount of energy to move water downhill. I’d go farther and say there are probably properties of water molecules themselves that determine the slope.
A lot of rocks you find in nature that have a common shape to the naked eye (some rocks always looking like parallelograms) are reflections of the actual atomic structures that make them up. Where iron and oxygen might form a bond at a 45° angle in a specific type of rock, you’ll often find those same rocks in nature with 45° cleavage angles where they naturally break along those lines.
It was always the most fascinating thing I learned in geology classes: that atomic level structures of rocks determines how they look to us in nature.
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