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| Over the past 150 years, the Isles Dernieres have undergone very rapid erosion and land loss due primarily to natural processes of relative sea-level rise, storms, and sand loss by coastal currents.Credit: USGS |
pollution is on the rise - you need to get your head out of the sand. If you want proof, look at Louisiana. Recently, the New Yorker did a story about the changing and shrinking coastline of Louisiana.. and you'll be surprised that some parts of the coast have now been submerged and the state loses half a football field a day to rising waters!! Here's an excerpt of the article with a link to the rest.
Louisiana’s Disappearing Coast
The New Yorker
Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana has the distinction—a dubious one, at best—of being among the fastest-disappearing places on Earth. Everyone who lives in the parish—and fewer and fewer people do—can point to some stretch of water that used to have a house or a hunting camp on it. This is true even of teen-agers. A few years ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially retired thirty-one Plaquemines place-names, including Bay Jacquin and Dry Cypress Bayou, because there was no there there anymore.
And what’s happening to Plaquemines is happening all along the coast. Since the days of Huey Long, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand square miles. If Delaware or Rhode Island had lost that much territory, the U.S. would have only forty-nine states. Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field’s worth of land. Every few minutes, it drops a tennis court’s worth. On maps, the state may still resemble a boot. Really, though, the bottom of the boot is in tatters, missing not just a sole but also its heel and a good part of its instep.
A few years ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration officially retired thirty-one Plaquemines place-names,
including Bay Jacquin and Dry Cypress Bayou, because there was no there
there anymore.
A variety of factors are driving the “land-loss crisis,” as it’s come to be called. But the essential one is a marvel of engineering. Thousands of miles of levees, flood walls, and revetments have been erected to manage the Mississippi. As the Army Corps of Engineers once boasted, “We harnessed it, straightened it, regularized it, shackled it.” This vast system, built to keep southern Louisiana dry, is the very reason the region is disintegrating, coming apart like an old shoe.
Since
the 1930s, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand
square miles. If Delaware or Rhode Island had lost that much territory,
the U.S. would have only forty-nine states.
Full article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/01/louisianas-disappearing-coast
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USGS Report:
Louisiana's 3 million acres of wetlands are lost at the rate about 75 square kilometers annually, but reducing these losses is proving to be difficult and costly.
For more information from the U.S. Geological Survey, visit:
https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/la-wetlands/
