Year 10 have learnt the ox-bow lake sequence as four static textbook diagrams, and many cannot say which way a meander moves or how long the process takes. The teacher opens the Timelapse layer in Google Earth on the board, flies to the Ucayali River near Pucallpa in eastern Peru and plays the annual satellite images from 1984 onwards. Students watch loops of the river swing sideways and downstream year by year, the neck of a meander narrow until the river breaks through, and the abandoned loop darken into an ox-bow lake that slowly fills with vegetation. The teacher replays the clip and pauses on the years either side of one cut-off, and students annotate a printed screenshot with the eroding outer bank, the pale sandbars on the inside bends and the new straight channel. They finish by rewriting the textbook sequence in their own words with the timescale they have seen, ready to apply it to a meander on the River Wye next lesson.
Tools: Google Earth Nine ideas for your own version in Generate
This page is one of a growing set of PICRAT examples by cell, subject and grade. Page maintained by Andy Perryer.