Stream Runoff

Runoff has to do with water that cannot be evaporated or absorbed right away so it travels downwards until it reaches the sea. Infiltration is when water that can be absorbed by any given soil until it can’t absorb it anymore. As far as mining is concerned streams include all types of moving water from narrow dry washes to rivers that are muddy and that may be a mile long. There are streams that only flow in certain periods or occasionally and these are known as intermittent and are streams that are supplied by melting snow and streams that have reached a depth where the water table consistently provides are known as permanent streams. One assortment of streams is by the drainage patterns they have. There are streams that form a pattern that runs long square or near square angles and these are known as rectangular streams. There are also streams that are dentric in nature and are seen in an overview to form a pattern that is sort of tree like and can normally be found around the slopes of a mountain. There are also trellis streams and these drain at almost right angles into the main stream. Streams are also portrayed depending on the relationship they have with topography or underlying strata. A consequent direction of the stream flows along the original slope of the land. Fractures or a major different in the hardness of the bedrock alters the direction of the flow of the subsequent stream and it usually causes it to go toward the direction of the softest rock.

There are also antecedent streams that go along with its original course without taking notice of any big changes in the topography of the land that surrounds it. Another type of stream is known as superimposed streams, which cut through overlying strata that is softer and that now have older underlying rocks for bedrock.

The biggest job of the streams consists of erosion, transportation and deposition. This process starts on a surface that is inclined where water falls as rain or snow, or in places where ice has formed. The amount of runoff in different areas is directly related to different factors such as how steep the slope is, the inability of the surface to absorb the moisture, when there is a lack of vegetation in certain areas, and how long the storm or rain decides to last.