Soft Matter and Complex Systems Seminar

Water headward erosion is a phenomenon responsible for extending the river valley into the hillside and hence creating a ramified drainage networks. Interestingly, this process can be modeled in terms of the geodesic growth of thin lines in a Poissonian field. During seminar I'm going to present results of my bachelor thesis focusing on numerical analysis of the river network evolution for different growth laws and different bifurcation rules, which determine the moments when the stream bifurcates into two daughter branches. Investigation includes inverse problem formulated as: can the growth law of a river be inferred from the analysis of the geometrical structure of its network?