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A new Stanford study challenges the decades-old view that the rise of land plants half a billion years ago dramatically changed the shapes of rivers.

Rivers generally come in two styles: braided, where multiple channels flow around sandy bars, and meandering, where a single channel cuts S-curves across a landscape.

Geologists have long thought that before vegetation, rivers predominantly ran in braided patterns, only forming meandering shapes after plant life took root and stabilized riverbanks.

The new study, published online in the journal Science, suggests the theory that braided rivers dominated the first 4 billion years of Earth's history is based on a misinterpretation of the geological record.

The research demonstrates that unvegetated meandering rivers can leave sedimentary deposits that look deceptively similar to those of braided rivers. This distinction is crucial for our understanding of Earth's early ecology and climate, as a river's type determines how long sediment, carbon, and nutrients are stored in floodplains.

"With our study, we're pushing back on the widely accepted story of what landscapes looked like when plant life first evolved on land," said lead author Michael Hasson, a Ph.D. student in Mathieu Lapôtre's lab at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

"We're rewriting the story of the intertwined relationship between plants and rivers, which is a significant revision to our understanding of the history of Earth."

The muddy floodplains of meandering rivers—dynamic ecosystems created over thousands of years by river overflow—are among the planet's most abundant non-marine carbon reservoirs. Carbon levels in the atmosphere, in the form of carbon dioxide, act as Earth's thermostat, regulating temperature over vast timescales.

Accurately budgeting for the carbon caches created by meandering rivers could help scientists build more comprehensive models of Earth's ancient and future climate.

"Floodplains play an important role in determining how, when, and whether carbon is buried or released back into the atmosphere," Hasson said.

"Based on this work, we argue carbon storage in floodplains would have been common for much longer than the classic paradigm that assumes meandering rivers only occurred over the last several hundred million years."

Where the river flows

To gauge vegetation's impact on river channel patterns, the researchers examined satellite imagery of about 4,500 bends in 49 current-day meandering rivers. About half of the rivers were unvegetated and half were densely or partly vegetated.

The researchers keyed in on point bars—the sandy landforms that develop on the inside bends of meandering rivers as water flow deposits sediments. Unlike the sandy bars that form in the middle of braided rivers, point bars tend to migrate laterally away from the centers of rivers. Over time, this migration contributes to meandering rivers' characteristically sinuous channel shapes.

Recognizing that these sandy bars form in different places based on river style, geologists for decades have measured the trajectory of bars in the rock record to reveal ancient river paths. The rocks, typically of sandstones and mudstones, provide evidence for divergent river styles because each deposits different kinds and amounts of rock-forming sediment, giving geologists clues for reconstructing long-ago river geometries.

If sandstones showed little variation in the angle of bar migration, geologists interpreted the bars as moving downstream, and thus that a braided river created the deposits.

Using this technique, geologists noticed that rivers changed the way they behaved around the time that plants first evolved on Earth. This observation led to the conclusion that land plants made river meandering possible, for instance, by trapping sediment and stabilizing riverbanks.

"In our paper, we show that this conclusion—which is taught in all geology curricula to this day—is most likely incorrect," said Lapôtre, the paper's senior author and an assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences at the Doerr School of Sustainability.

By looking at modern rivers with a wide range of vegetation cover, the researchers showed that plants consistently change the direction of point bar migration. Specifically, in the absence of vegetation, point bars tend to migrate downstream—like mid-channel bars do in braided rivers.

"In other words, we show that, if one were to use the same criterion geologists use in ancient rocks on modern rivers, meandering rivers would be miscategorized as braided rivers," Lapôtre said.

Rivers over time

The findings offer a provocative new window into Earth's past eons, upending the conventional picture of how rivers have sculpted continents. If indeed carbon-loaded floodplains were laid down far more extensively over history, scientists may need to revise models of major natural climate swings over time, with implications for our understanding of ongoing climate change.

"Understanding how our planet is going to respond to human-induced climate change hinges on having an accurate baseline for how it has responded to past perturbations," Hasson said. "The rock record provides that baseline, but it's only useful if we interpret it accurately."

"We're suggesting that an important control on carbon cycling—where carbon is stored, and for how long, due to river type and floodplain creation—hasn't been fully understood," he said. "Our study now points the way to better assessments."

Additional co-authors are from the University of Padova and the University of British Columbia.