The roughly triangular tract of land enclosed and traversed by the diverging distributaries of a river emptying into the sea or other large body of water. So-called from its resemblance in shape to the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, and first applied as a geographical term to the Nile delta. Figure D1 shows the Lena Delta in Arctic Russia.
The Lena Delta is the largest delta in the Siberian arctic. It is a region of permafrost and patterned ground, with Crysols (accompanied by Histosols and Gleysols) as the dominant soil type. The region is highly sensitive to global change, particularly in terms of the genesis of methane, which is anticipated to have a significant positive feedback on global warming (Wagner et al., 2005). Image courtesy of the European Space Agency.
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Bibliography
Wagner, D., Lipski, A., Embacher, A., and Gattinger, A., 2005. Methane fluxes in permafrost habitats of the Lena Delta: effects of microbial community structure and organic matter quality. Environmental Microbiology 7: 1582–1592.
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(2008). Delta. In: Chesworth, W. (eds) Encyclopedia of Soil Science. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-3995-9_149
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-3995-9_149
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