Louisiana’s Disappearing Coast

Watch this get quoted to support Global Warming ...

#1, bet on it.

FTA: "Whenever it overtopped its banks—something it used to do virtually every spring—the river cast its sediment across the plain. Season after season, layer after layer, clay and sand and silt built up. In this way, the “strong brown god” assembled the Louisiana Gulf Coast out of bits and pieces of Illinois and Iowa and Minnesota and Missouri and Arkansas and Kentucky."

Imagine that. It flooded almost every year for centuries. But now global warming is the problem - not.

quit trying to corral the Mississippi River and let it flood into the Atchafayala Basin, like it did for millions of years before the US Army Corps of Engineers got involved and you will restore Louisiana coastlines.

Of course, you put the Port of New Orleans and Baton Rouge out of business, but you gotta preserve the swamp

Long read. A couple of shots about Gorbal Warming but not too bad for The New Yorker. Good bit of info for those not down her (like me).

Nothing new, but this is a good treatment of an intractable problem. I read McFee´s book on the Achafalaya river mess 25 or 30 years ago. This is a good review of a real mess which is the whole lower Mississippi river. I have visited Plaqumines parish, too. I have been fascinated with this stuff since 9th grade Earth Science class.

Great river deltas need to be nourished with injections of cubic miles of silt, but flood control dams capture most of the silt, and the delata goes away.

And how many knew that the Mississippi decided a long time ago that it wanted to take a different route to the sea? The New River Control Aux Structure was built in 1963 to keep the entire Mississippi from going down the Achafalaya River course and leaving New Orleans pretty much dry. The river has been trying to break out for centuries, and after the Achafalaya log jam was stupidly blasted free over a century ago, it started to go that way. Well over half a century ago it would have gone, and WILL eventually go, I´ll bet and New Orleans will not be at the mouth of the Mississippi.

And the river has been "jacking itself up" for quite some time, too. The river bed fills with silt, making it shallower (even at reduced silt loads), so tries to get wider. So, we raise the levees holding it in place. Raise the bed, raise the levee, repeat, repeat, eventually the river is "jacked up", ever more desperate to go DOWNHILL another way. Eventually, it WILL find a better way, probably through the Achafalaya River bed, and we will probably not be able to put it back.

I started to read this, considered the source, pooped out and went to the end --

"If there is to be an answer to the problem of control, it’s going to be more control..."

A little more mush and it was over and I considered my choice to cut my reading short, telling myself "Well played, N., well played".

One of these days there will be a Humptey Dumptey moment, probably during spring flooding, and "all the King´s horses, and all the King´s men..." will not be able to put the river back in it´s original bed.

Been hearing this for years and LA is still there. Fake news from the New Yorker, as always.

Interesting article. As No. 8 says, the river will eventually free itself and it will be cataclysmic. It may be in 20, 50, 100 years from now but it can´t be contained forever. Humans will adjust, NO may end up gone or a tenth of its current size but we will move and adapt.

The author of course has to bring in global warming and "humans bad, Earth good" trope. The ´Old Man´ has been flooding down there before the first gasoline engine was ever dreamed of and will always be bringing disaster in some form.

It´s called "erosion," a naturally-occurring phenomenon since the beginning of time.

The Mississippi river build South Louisiana. Levees were used to channel the river down to the Gulf in the early 1900´s,interrupting the river´s land building effect.
Diversions have been built in the last few years to divert this land building effect of the river and they are having some success adding acreage in some areas.

Yes, flooding is a local risk.

The good news is that we do not have earthquakes, major tornados, huge forest fires, rock slides or blizzards.

Back in the ´60´s, when I was in high school in Louisiana, we learned then the coast was eroding from all the water down there. This is nature. It´s how it works. It is real global change as has been happening since the beginning of time. We also learned that the continental shift of the west coast will eventually put California up around Alaska. Nothing to do with populations, cars or cows. Just good ole mother nature.

I wonder if the writer for the New Yorker has ever set foot I Louisiana.