Something that absolutely fascinated me in geography lessons at school - and I loved geography - was learning about oxbow lakes: how bars of silt slowly developed at the bottom of river bends and increased the angulation of the bend - until eventually, the flow of the river decided to take a line of least resistance and cut across the bend, leaving a crescent-moon shaped relic of its former self in the form of a lake curved in the shape of an ox collar - the kind of collar used when ploughing. In finding the origin of that term - I'm not sure we dived into the etymology at school (but I may have been too busy drawing the phenomenon with my mapping pen and colored inks: the amount of drawing involved was one of the reasons I loved it so much) - I discovered that in Australia, oxbow lakes are billabongs. Now I've learned something - I thought that billabongs were common or garden ponds that jolly swagmen camped by, not such specific topographical features.
So flying over the Mississippi on my way to Dallas (to wait for a delayed flight to LA) I was very happy to see a perfect example of such a lake in formation. Apparently there are many of them along this river, created artificially as the river was straightened out - but this particular watery formation seems to be following the natural course of things without assistance.
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