River island

A small, inceptive, river island at Sihoť, Bratislava, Slovakia

Satellite picture of Csepel Island in Hungary which is south of Budapest city centre

A river island is any exposed land within a river. Properly defined it excludes shoals between seasonally varying flows and may exclude semi-coastal islands such as in deltas.

These islands result from changes in the course of a river such as interactions with a tributary or the opposing fluvial actions of deposition and/or erosion such as forming a natural cut and meander. Nascent vegetation-free sandbars and mudflats may dissipate and shift or build up into such islands through deposition and which may be assisted through artificial reinforcement or natural factors such as, reeds, palms, evergreen trees or willows, to large examples covering many square kilometers, examples of which are given below.

Regional nomenclature

Look up towhead in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

The term "towhead" implies a little islet or sandbar within a river (most often the Mississippi River) having a grouping or thicket of trees, and is often used in the Midwestern United States. Many rivers, if wide enough, can house considerably large islands. The term "towhead" was popularised by Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

In England, a river island in the Thames is referred to as an "ait" (or "eyot").

Largest and smallest

Friday Island is an example of a very small island with a solid-foundations house

Illha Do Bananal is the largest river island by area.^[1]ut Ilha do Bananal.Majuli is being considered in Guinness because of a propaganda by its state and central government to show it is the biggest , which it is not in reality.

Umananda is among contenders as the smallest permanently-inhabited river island with fixed dwellings at 0.02 km². Majuli and Umananda lie in the Brahmaputra River. Many as tiny as Umananda or smaller, inhabited, exist in the Amazon basin and BanglaOn canalised rivers such as the Thames and the Seine one-home islands of permanent-materials homes exist such as Monkey, Friday, Holm and D'Oyly Carte islands, as canalisation reduces the erosion of the islands and in particular limits the height of flash flooding by maintaining substantial "heads" of water through barrages, see dam.

Lists of river islands

• Note: Includes some river islands that also have an ocean coast.

See also

Notes

References