Rivers are rarely the calm, orderly streams we imagine on maps. Over time, their winding paths—called meanders—shift, bend, and occasionally snap off in sudden "cutoff" events that shorten loops and reshape the landscape. While scientists have long suspected that such cutoffs inject a dose of unpredictability into river evolution, a new study published in Communications Earth & Environment demonstrates that these abrupt events are, by themselves, enough to produce chaos in river channels.

Rivers are rarely the calm, orderly streams we imagine on maps. Over time, their winding paths—called meanders—shift, bend, and occasionally snap off in sudden “cutoff” events that shorten loops and reshape the landscape. While scientists have long suspected that such cutoffs inject a dose of unpredictability into river evolution, a new study published in Communications Earth & Environment demonstrates that these abrupt events are, by themselves, enough to produce chaos in river channels.

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