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The role of externally imposed sediment supplies on the evolution of meandering rivers and their floodplains is poorly understood, despite analytical advances in our physical understanding of river meandering. The Amazon river basin hosts tributaries that are largely unaffected by engineering controls and hold a range of sediment loads, allowing us to explore the influence that sediment supply has on river evolution. Here we calculate average annual rates of meander migration within 20 reaches in the Amazon Basin from Landsat imagery spanning 1985-2013. We find that rivers with high sediment loads experience annual migration rates that are higher than those of rivers with lower sediment loads. Meander cutoff also occurs more frequently along rivers with higher sediment loads. Differences in meander migration and cutoff rates between the study reaches are not explained by differences in channel slope or river discharge. Because faster meander migration and higher cutoff rates lead to increased sediment-storage space in the resulting oxbows, we suggest that sediment supply modulates the reshaping of floodplain environments by meandering rivers. We conclude that imposed sediment loads influence planform changes in lowland rivers across the Amazon.

Confluences are geomorphologic features fed by distinct channel tributaries that record the contribution of multiple sediment sources. They are key features of both fluvial and submarine channels in geomorphologic and sedimentologic terms. Here, we use high-quality three-dimensional seismic data from SE Brazil to document the response of a submarine channel confluence to turbidity currents originating from a tributary. The studied channel system consists of a west tributary, an east tributary, and a postconfluence channel, with the last two comprising the main channel at present. Downstream from the confluence, changes in planform morphology and architecture were found due to the effect of turbidity currents sourced from the west tributary channel. A channel bend in the main channel curved toward the west when it was first formed but later curved toward the east, and so remains until the present day. This process led to the migration of the confluence point ~500 m to the east, and changed the bed morphology from discordant (where the beds of tributaries and main channels meet at an unequal depth) to concordant (where the beds of tributaries and main channels meet at approximately the same depth). In addition to the channel bend near the confluence, two other bends further downstream recorded significant changes with time, increasing channel sinuosity from 1.11 to 1.72. These three channel bends near the confluence accumulated a large volume of sediment at their inner banks, generating depositional bars. Multiple channel forms within the depositional bars indicate the occurrence of large-scale lateral migration near the confluence. Hence, turbidity currents from the west tributary are shown to influence the submarine channel by promoting lateral channel migration, confluence migration, increases in channel sinuosity, and the formation of large depositional bars. These variations near the confluence reveal a change in tributary activity and a shift in sediment sources from east to west on the continental shelf. Such a shift suggests variations in sedimentary processes on the continental shelf probably due to avulsions on Doce River Delta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]