Relief features of Canal İstanbul environment

Abstract

Canal İstanbul is a waterway project designed as an alternative to the Bosphorus, reaching from the Küçükçekmece Lake to the Black Sea, including Sazlıdere to the north. The boundaries of the study area were drawn with a 3 km buffer zone that was passed to the east and west of this line, and it was named as the “Canal İstanbul environment”. The area consists mainly of Tertiary units and has a flat topography surface. In this respect, it is essential that the site is examined in detail and that the relief characteristics of the site are expressed together with the quantitative results. In this context, absolute relief, slope, relative area, basin relief, relative elevation, hypsometric curve, hypsometric integral, degree of erosion and fragmentation intensity, valley density analysis were used to reveal the general character of the relief, and then the field profiles were provided with a complete view of the field. Accordingly, approximately half of the area with a maximum elevation of 187 m is below 70 m. When the slope values are evaluated, it is seen that half of the surrounding is below the slope value of 15%. The hypsometric curve showing the stage of the geomorphological evolution of the study area shows a slightly concave structure with relatively mature topography conditions. The hypsometric integral, which is the quantitative expression of this curve, was found to be 0.34, thus confirming the maturity of the field. On the other hand, 1x1 km grid based topographic amplitude varies 7–155 m. So, erosion is more effective in the valleys. The valley density obtained by the ratio of total valley length to total area was determined as 2.98 km/km2. In addition, superimposed, projected and composite profiles with five transverse one longitudinal profiles taken from the field show that the high effect of Sazlıdere on general geomorphologic view.