Geography Field Trip to a River

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Geography Field Trip to a River

The aim of the field trip was to study the changing characteristics of a river as it travels downstream, and to obtain “primary data” to answer hypothesis questions (see page   ).  We collected primary data by visiting Lower Debden Brook, Upper Debden Brook Upper and the River Roding, which form the River Roding drainage basin. Measurements were taken and carefully recorded at each study site.

To investigate the aim, it was broken down into eight hypothesis that were tested (see page)

   

The trip to Epping Forest was worthwhile because I gained geographical knowledge on the topic of “Rivers” and discovered why river characteristics change as you travel downstream.  I learnt that at the source of the stream the river’s energy is focussed downwards which creates vertical erosion.  This type of erosion causes the channel to become deep and narrow.  Further drownstream, due to the formation of meanders, the rivers energy is focussed outwards in the form of lateral erosion.  This occurs on the outside of the bends.  At different stages of a river there are various processes which produce different landforms For example, v-shaped valleys in highland regions and deltas in lowland regions.  Knowing this information enables me to understand the hypothesis because each statement involves vertical and lateral erosion in explaining why each characteristic occurs.  For example the wetted perimeter (see page      ) is the amount of riverbed that is submerged by water.  This measurement depends on the width of the channel and this changes due to vertical and lateral erosion.  Another example is stream velocity (see page   )  Water flows faster through smaller spaces, therefore, because vertical erosion narrows the channel and lateral erosion widens the channel the water flows at different speeds.

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Although the field trip was fairly successful there were many limitations.  These included:

 

  • the study sites were all within the same drainage basin
  • the different sites were only visited once, on one day, and in one season
  • the equipment used to take the measurements was very basic and did not enable us to gain precise results.  Also, we had no experience of using the Gun Climonetre, which was used to measure the gradient.  Therefore the results could not be relied on as being accurate.

The method we followed allowed us to obtain ...

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