Does the top of a flowing river curve convex because of Bernoulli's Principle? I was looking at a picture of a flooding river on Google Earth, and noticed that most of the debris was concentrated in a line down the middle of the river, corresponding to the area of most rapid flow. I know that floating objects tend to float on the highest level of water they can find, and conjectured that the fastest flow must then also have the highest surface. This opened up thinking about Bernoulli's Principle in fast flowing rivers in general. Rocks and sand along the bottom of a river must be getting pushed into the area of fastest flow, and held there, by the higher pressure of the slower flows around the sides. Rivers carve new channels during floods, because a small new channel would have a faster flow than the main channel, and suck(er, have more stuff pushed into it) by Bernoulli's Principle, scouring the sides of the new channel more and more. People getting sucked into and caught by a riptide must actually be being pushed into it, and kept in it, by the higher pressures of the comparatively still waters on either side of a riptide. Same with people caught in a flooding river. Boaters often get caught in "hydraulics" below dams or obstructions, and held there, unable to break out into the river flow around them. The question is, does the pressure of the slower water along the edges of a rushing river push enough water into the fast current to push up the surface of the river so it is convex in cross section, rather than more or less flat? There is a river near me that has a concrete box utility duct of some sort that is square in cross section, and it crosses the river as nearly level as I can tell. I used a 6 foot bubble level and a laser pointer. During the last flood, the water in the center of the river piled up in waves against the duct in the center of the river in waves several feet high, whereas the still water at the edges of the river were only an inch or two high along the sides of the duct. I suppose the rushing water in the center of the river could have built up the waves. I took pictures at the time, but I guess I would have to have a circumstance where the water on either side of the river was definitely lower than the bottom of the duct, while the middle of the river was in contact with the bottom of the duct in order to clearly prove the evidence.