A Little Rock layered Oxbow Cake

layers of Oxbows are a favorite treat for the scenery around Little Rock, Arkansas. The Arkansas River leaves the south eastern extent of the Ozarks at Little Rock and spill out onto the western fringes of the wide and slowly rising Mississippi River alluvial plain. Doing so it dumps a lot of sediments that have generated hundreds of oxbows as the river's channel lashes around on its way to the Mississippi. The formal word for such activity is "anastomosis", which is also applied in medicine and biology - think "by-pass surgery." Thia HRTM has been truncated to between 68 and 79 meters above sea level so as to focus just on the meandering pattern as a natural art form. Data from USGS's The National Map was processed in Global Mapper and rendered at 3 meters per pixel.