^aUS Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station, 3909 Halls Ferry Road, Vicksburg, MS 39180,USA

The LMV occupies the broad deep synclinal trough of the Mississippi Embayment which extends from Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf of Mexico in a slightly sinuous north-south trend. The embayment is filled with a north to south thickening wedge of non-marine and marine sediment ranging in age from Jurassic to Holocene. The major landscapes of the LMV may be considered in four regions: (1) a narrow active meander belt in a broad valley of Late Pleistocene valley train in the northern third; (2) a wide mosaic of interwoven Holocene meander belts in the middle third; (3) a relatively narrow valley of the Atchafalaya Basin bounded on each side by narrow meander belts in the upper part of the lower third; and (4) the broad distributary wedge of the deltaic plain in the southernmost region of the valley. The valley trains vary in age and landform with the oldest occurring as slightly dissected low ridges and the youngest as broad flats separated by shallow interwoven former braided channels. Meander belts formed throughout the Holocene are comprised of low natural levee ridges flanking abandoned courses and bordered by crescent-shaped oxbow lakes and ridge and swale topography. In the middle third of the valley, meander belts are separated by expansive backswamps of very little relief. The deltaic plain is also exceptionally flat, interrupted by the low natural levee ridges of the abandoned deltaic distributaries.

The floodplain of the LMV is a complex mosaic of fluvial features and landscapes within the four landscape regions. Included in this mosaic are abandoned channels and courses, lateral accretion topography of ridges and swales, natural levees, crevasses and crevasse channels, distributary channels, backswamps and rimswamps, alluvial fans and aprons, valley trains (braided stream terraces), lakes and lacustrine deltas, terraces, and the alluvial valley bluff.

Changes in the hydraulic regime of the Lower Mississippi River (LMR) since the Late Pleistocene have played a major role in the development of the landscape of the valley. The most important regime change was the diminishment of the influence of Wisconsinan glaciation in the upper Midwest and the resultant evolution of the Mississippi River from a broad braided outwash channel to a more narrow but sinuous meandering channel at the end of the Pleistocene. During the Holocene, the Mississippi River undoubtedly responded to major climatic changes, rising sea level, tributary stream influence, and possibly tectonism, diapirism, and subsidence through the growth and evolution, and abandonment of it's meander belts and deltas.