The upcoming loss of the Mississippi river delta
JUL 09, 2009
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.023495
csmonitor.com : Unless enormous amounts of soil are dumped onto the Mississippi River Delta, the region could lose up to 5,212 square miles of land to ocean and tidal marsh by 2100 say two Louisiana State University scientists.This could leave New Orleans with just the French Quarter and the airport above part of a vast bay."This was an attempt to give real boundary conditions for restoration efforts,” says Harry Roberts, one of the researchers conducting the study.The researchers acknowledge that the study is a first cut at putting numbers to the problem. Others are likely to devise more precise estimates. “But even if we’re off by 50 percent, it’s still bad,” says Michael Blum, Dr. Roberts’s colleague on the work.
© 2009 American Institute of Physics
