A RIVER REMEMBERS: MEANDERING MEMORY OF WATER

BENEATH the calm surface of a river lies an ancient intelligence — one that remembers every bend, flood, and wandering path it has ever carved through the Earth.

- HRITHIK KIRAN BAGADE

This picture of the Nowitna river in Alaska shows two oxbow lakes

(OLIVER KURMIS)

Rivers seem alive, and in a sense, they are. They shift, meander, split, and rejoin like living veins across the skin of continents. But what’s truly remarkable is that even when a river changes course, dries up, or is forced into artificial channels, it often retains a kind of geological memory. This memory isn’t conscious, of course, but written into the landscape itself, in subtle slopes, buried sediments, and the unseen pull of past flow. The idea that rivers “remember” their old paths isn’t poetry, but science.