Movin' the Mississippi
Talk about exciting news - looks like they're considering moving the Mississippi back on a more natural path to the Gulf.
“The thing is to stop wasting 120 million tons of sediment” the river carries into the Gulf of Mexico on an average year, Dr. Reed said. Because the bird-foot delta has grown so far into the gulf, she said, the river’s mouth is at the edge of the continental shelf. As a result, the sediment it carries ends up in deep water, where it is lost forever.A diversion would send the river’s richly muddy water into marshes or shallow-water areas where, Dr. Reed said, “the natural processes of waves, coastal currents and even storms can rework that sediment and bring it up and bring it into the coast.”
“It’s a lot,” she said, enough to cover 60 square miles half an inch deep every year, an amount that would slow or even reverse land loss in the state’s marshes, which have shrunk by about a quarter, more than 1,500 square miles, since the 1930’s. Such a program would not turn things around immediately, “but every year new land would be built,” said Joseph T. Kelley, a professor of marine geology at the University of Maine, who took part in the April meeting.
I just hope that this actually happens - and that it happens in time to help this region out. I also hope that the people who live in the region into which the Miss will flow are taken into consideration. There aren't many, it seems, but they need to be a part of the process.
(from NYT)