Get premium membership and access revision papers with marking schemes, video lessons and live classes.

Processing. Please wait.

In this lesson we are going to discuss about how river capture occurs

Answer Text:
River Capture/Beheading/Piracy/Ab straction
- Diversion of head waters of one river into the system of an adjacent powerful river due to erosion.
The river that captures is called pirate.
The captured one is called victim.

How it occurs
- At first there are a powerful river and a weaker river flowing adjacent to each other.

- The powerful river erodes vertically and laterally than the weak river making it to flow at a lower level.
- At the same time, it extends its valley backwards by headward erosion.
- The stronger river eventually joins the valley of the weak river.
- The headwaters of the weaker river start flowing into the valley of the stronger river e.g. R. Tano in Ghana was captured by the Black Volta River and R. Eyong was captured by Imo in S. Nigeria. The remaining section of the beheaded river is called a misfit/beheaded river.
The dry valley between the elbow of capture and the new course of the misfit stream is called a wind gap.