Jack Kinkade, age 9, of Shawnee, Okla

 What is a river delta?

A great river seems to do as it pleases  It winds along taking its own lazy time and swishing its watery skirts from side to aide  Sometimes its waters may sink down to a shy little trickle  Sometimes its waters swell up, spill over its banks and slop all over the land  But the wonderful river is not really able to do just as it chooses: Like everything else in our world, it must obey certain rules and laws of Mother Nature 

Whatever the river  does, there is always a reasons. People have brains and they can use them to figure out why, the river does what it does. They can get to work and control the river, making it‑do what they want.  They can channel off some of its water to run through their thirsty fields  They can build  dams: to stop, it from flowing over its banks and store the extra water for other uses in shimmering, man‑made reservoirs 

One of Mother Naturals laws says that flowing water must always go down hill  A river can never flaw up hill and over  a mountain,   and: the land, no matter how‑flat it seems,, is almost always tipped, slightly  in one direction  This is the direction a  flowing, river  must take.  On the way it  twists and turns to find a path and there is a reason‑ for every little turn it  makes  At, last  it may reach,a big lake where it can dump its running waters.  But most likely it  must  keep on going, until it meets the silvery sea,

This is the river’s mouth,  the place  , where its  waters  meet:,the waters of the  world‑wide ocean  And ,this is   where all  the world’s big   rivers form a delta  The  word delta is the name of a letter, the ancestor of our latter D  it is, wing shaped.

It was shaped like a fan or triangle and this is more or less the shape of the river delta, It is a larger fan‑shaped area of mud and silt which forms at the mouth of the great river 

There are also reasons, naturally, why the great river forms a delta at its mouth  On its long journey over the land it laps at the rooks and the soil  Fine grains and fragments break off and all sorts of chemicals dissolve in its waters  While the river is flowing, all this silt and sand and other chemicals are stirred up and float along in the water  When the great Mississippi reaches the sea, its waters are like muddy soup  Suddenly the running river must put on its brakes and slow down  For it meets the wide and calmer waters of the ocean and it can no longer flow happily downhill 

Chemicals in the ocean make the fine fragments of silt loin together in larger pieces  Down they sink to the bottom of the grater and form a layer of mud, a wide delta at the mouth of the river  In tan years, we are told, the old Mississippi parries down enough mud to cover Tulsa and the whole state of Oklahoma with half an inch of good topsoil