How can a river delta not be at the mouth? (Mississippi example)
I'm creating a bronze age setting and one of the civilizations gets their powers from a river whose irrigation produces a vast food supply. So, I decided to figure out where the most powerful city states would be placed based around where the earth would be most fertile and I figured it would be at the delta, close to the mouth.
However, doing some research I found that the Mississippi delta is not considered at New Orleans (where the mouth is) but further up stream where it merges with the Yazoo river. Apparently this area was a huge, bustling cotton mecca and I was just wondering how this works. I understand that forks irrigates a wider area of land, but how is this a delta? And how can it be better for agriculture than the river's mouth?
I'm not American and don't have a very good grasp of rivers, so if someone could give a better explanation of a river delta to me (so that it encompasses the case of Mississippi) I would greatly appreciate it.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/27912. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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This exists.
In Botswana, the Okavango River branches out to create a wide, swampy area called, appropriately enough, the Okavango Delta.
To quote the first line from the Wikipedia entry (emphasis added):
The Okavango Delta (or Okavango Grassland) (formerly spelled Okovango or Okovanggo) in Botswana is a very large, swampy inland delta formed where the Okavango River reaches a tectonic trough in the central part of the endorheic basin of the Kalahari.
Also, be sure to check it out on a map or satellite view.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/71095. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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