The world's largest inland river delta

The world’s largest inland river delta Today’s Image of the Day from the European Space Agency features a variety of beautiful water bodies across Alberta, Canada. 

The world’s largest inland river delta is visible in the photo, which includes Lake Athabasca and the Peace, Athabasca, and Slave Rivers.

Visible to the left, Lake Claire in the Wood Buffalo National Park is also part of the delta system. 

In rare cases the river delta is located inside a large valley and is called an inverted river delta. Sometimes a river divides into multiple branches in an inland area, only to rejoin and continue to the sea. Such an area is called an inland delta, and often occurs on former lake beds. The Inner Niger Delta, Peace–Athabasca Delta, and Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta are notable examples. The Amazon also has an inland delta before the island of Marajó, and the Danube has one in the valley on the Slovak-Hungarian border between Bratislava and Iža.
In some cases, a river flowing into a flat arid area splits into channels that evaporate as it progresses into the desert. The Okavango Delta in Botswana is one example.

The formation of a delta is complicated, multiple, and cross-cutting over time, but in a simple delta three main types of bedding may be distinguished: the bottomset beds, foreset/frontset beds, and topset beds. This three part structure may be seen in small scale by crossbedding

The image was captured by Landsat-8 on April 13, 2014.

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By Chrissy Sexton, Earth.com Staff Writer

Image Credit: ESA