SQ - Let's Meander Around The Cemetery
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Located in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery. Main entrance is off of 10 mile road. Posted hours are: 8:00am-7:30pm daily.
The SQ in the cache name above signifies Spirit Quest, a project to distinguish those caches that are set in cemeteries or memorial gardens. Please be respectful of the area, and observe their rules and posted hours, Michigan law states that you are only permitted to visit cemeteries dawn to dusk through out the state unless other hours are posted.
The posted coord's will take you to a spot where when you look west and down you will see a couple of meanders and ox-bow in the making.
The term meander derives from a river, located in present-day Turkey, and known to the ancient Greeks as Maiandros or Maeander, characterised by a very convoluted path along the lower reach. As such, even in Classical Greece the name of the river had become a common noun meaning anything convoluted and winding, such as decorative patterns or speech and ideas, as well as the geomorphological feature. Strabo said: "... its course is so exceedingly winding that everything winding is called meandering."
The Meander River is located, south of Izmir, east of the ancient Greek town of Miletus, now, Milet, Turkey. It flows through a graben in the Menderes Massif, but has a flood plain much wider than the meander zone in its lower reach. In the Turkish name, the Büyük Menderes River, Menderes is from "Meander". Meanders are also formed as a result of deposition and erosion.
A meander in general is a bend in a sinuous watercourse. A meander is formed when the moving water in a stream erodes the outer banks and widens its valley. A stream of any volume may assume a meandering course, alternatively eroding sediments from the outside of a bend and depositing them on the inside. The result is a snaking pattern as the stream meanders back and forth across its down-valley axis. When a meander gets cut off from the main stream, an oxbow lake is formed. Over time meanders migrate downstream, sometimes in such a short time as to create civil engineering problems for local municipalities attempting to maintain stable roads and bridges.
Most meanders occur in the region of a river channel with shallow gradients, a well-developed floodplain, and cohesive floodplain material. Deposition of sediment occurs on the inner edge, because the secondary flow of the river sweeps and rolls sand, rocks and other submerged objects across the bed of the river towards the inside radius of the river bend, creating a slip-off slope called a point bar. Erosion is greater on the outside of the bend where the soil is not protected by deposits of sand and rocks. The current on the outside bend is more effective in eroding the unprotected soil, and the inside bend receives steadily increasing deposits of sand and rocks, and the meander tends to grow in the direction of the outside bend, forming a small cliff called a cut bank.
Looking at the nearest meander you can see the sediment being deposited on the inner bank and the erosion being done to the outer bank.
Meander formation is a result of natural factors and processes. The waveform configuration of a stream is constantly changing. Once a channel begins to follow a sinusoidal path the amplitude and concavity of the loops increase dramatically due to the effect of helical flow sweeping dense eroded material towards the inside of the bend, and leaving the outside of the bend unprotected and therefore vulnerable to accelerated erosion, forming a positive feedback loop. In the words of Elizabeth A. Wood:
... this process of making meanders seems to be a self-intensifying process ... in which greater curvature results in more erosion of the bank, which results in greater curvature ...
Flow of a fluid around a bend is vortex flow in order to conserve angular momentum. The speed of flow on the outside of the bend is fastest, and on the inside of the bend is slowest. The water surface is also super-elevated towards the outside of the bend, so on the floor of the channel the water pressure is greater on the outside of the bend than on the inside of the bend. This pressure gradient drives a cross-current towards the inside of the bend. The cross-current along the floor of the channel is part of the secondary flow and sweeps dense eroded material towards the inside of the bend. The cross-current then rises to the surface near the inside of the bend and, moving near the surface, flows towards the outside of the bend, forming a helical flow. The greater the curvature of the bend, and the faster the flow, the stronger is the cross-current and the stronger the sweeping of dense eroded material along the floor of the channel towards the inside bank.
Oxbow lakes are created when growing meanders intersect each other and cut off a meander loop, leaving it without an active cutting stream. Over a period of time, these oxbow lakes tend to dry out or fill in with sediments. Eventually this meander may become an ox-bow lake.
See picture below for the life history of a meander.
The requirements to log this cache must be completed as follows. Please do not post your answers to your log. E-mail me with your answers to get credit for this cache
1. Look closely at the first meander here. Describe the amount of sediment deposits if any, and if it is being cut off. Is there more sediment on the west side or the east side of the meander? What does the outer bank look like? Is it level to the river or is it a higher bank? Also describe the water flow both as the river enters and also as it exits the meander. Is it faster on the outer edge or on the inner edge?
2. Once done if you travel east across the road a picture with the Callahan headstone would be great, but not required.
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