Today, many of the world's deltas are highly populated and experiencing rapid rates of deterioration. We need tools that can explain and predict the long-term evolution of these systems to the formation of baselines for sustainable restoration. Deltas are complex systems in which diverse processes interact across a vast range of time and space scales. However, contrary to what intuition might suggest, we find that simple geometric models can be powerful at explaining the long-term system response to different external forcing. Based on this framework, we construct the first delta building model able to capture long-term interactions between organic sediment dynamics and delta evolution. |