Meandering of the Büyük Menderes River Today’s Image of the Day from NASA Earth Observatory features the Büyük Menderes River in southwestern Turkey.

The river rises in west central Turkey near Dinar, then twists and turns across 382 miles until it reaches the Aegean Sea.

According to NASA, The river’s ancient Greek name Maíandros, or Maeander, became synonymous with the bending character of river courses, and the modern geographical term “meander” was born. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and space research. The Büyük Menderes River, is a river in southwestern Turkey. It rises in west central Turkey near Dinar before flowing west through the Büyük Menderes graben until reaching the Aegean Sea in the proximity of the ancient Ionian city Miletus. The word “meander” is used to describe a winding pattern, after the river. 

Much of the landscape that the Büyük Menderes River flows through is a depression in the landscape known as a graben – an elongated block of the Earth’s crust lying between two seismic faults

The false-color image was captured on March 30, 2021 by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8.

Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory 

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By Chrissy Sexton, Earth.com Staff Writer