Knickpoint

Knickpoints reflect different conditions and processes on the river, often caused by previous erosion due to glaciation or variance in lithology.

[4] On Titan, mountain valleys adjacent to the present-day hydrocarbon seas show evidence of knickpoints and recent sea-level change.

This incision begins at the formation of a knickpoint, and its upstream migration depends heavily upon the drainage area (and so the discharge of the river), material through which it cuts, and how large the drop in base level was.

Here, much of the surface rock is a massive basalt sill, with large cracks filled with easily weathered sandstone made visible by the Zambezi's course across the land.

Sharp changes in slope are common in rivers flowing through the heavily carved landscape left behind when glaciers retreat.

Large drainages into the oceans the world over can be seen to have continued over land which was once exposed, whether due to tectonic subsidence, sea level rise, or other factors.

Bathymetric imagery is available for much of the United States' western coast, and in particular the ocean floor just offshore of rivers in the Pacific Northwest exhibit such underwater features.

This sudden lack of ocean water influx allowed the basin to decrease in volume and increase in salinity, and as a result of the drop in surface level many of the rivers which flow still today into the Mediterranean began to incise.

[7] As is observed for many major waterfalls, knickpoints migrate upstream due to bedrock erosion[11] leaving in their wake deep channels and abandoned floodplains, which then become terraces.

Knickpoint retreat is easily demonstrated in some locations affected by postglacial isostatic response and relative sea-level drop such as in Scotland.

Knickpoints and knickzones can be semiautomatically extracted from Digital Elevation Models in Geographic Information System software (i.e. ArcGIS).