As a river cuts through a landscape, it can operate like a conveyer belt, moving truckloads of sediment over time. Knowing how quickly or slowly this sediment flows can help engineers plan for the downstream impact of restoring a river or removing a dam. But the models currently used to estimate sediment flow can be off by a wide margin. An MIT team has come up with a better formula to calculate how much sediment a fluid can push across a granular bed — a process known as bed load…
