Why is Louisiana shrinking so quickly?

we have to understand what the state's coastline will look like 50 years from now is not what it looks like today between 2015 and 2016 Louisiana's coastline has lost land the size of a football field every hundred minutes it's a roading fast enough for federal agency and state officials declared a national crisis but what causes Louisiana to lose so much coastline so quickly this is caused by a few main reasons the first levees [Music] the century before we've bought the Great Western River the Spanish in the French built dikes to keep the Mississippi out of New Orleans at flood stage in 40 years we continued the levee the entire length of the great alluvial desert geologists and geographers who've been studying the coasts start with the Mississippi River in its levee system after the 1927 major flooding of the Mississippi River the federal government decided that they were going to raise the height of levees and that blocks off the potential for sediment laced water getting back into wetlands without the Mississippi sediment waste water replenishing the wetlands the areas could no longer keep up with the natural sinking of the land the second cause of Louisiana land loss comes from oil and gas companies it's been estimated that there are more than 10,000 miles of canals that have been used for exploration and production of oil and gas along the coastline when those canals are dug saltwater runs into the wetlands upsetting the salinity balance and killing off the plants there are some unintended causes of the loss of land as well invasive species that were introduced by humans like nutria and Asian scale insects feast on the wetlands a family of nutria will eat wetland grasses by eating out the roots and when that happens the first storm that comes along man that that piece of wetland has just washed away and finally sea level rise is another large part of Louisiana's disappearing coastline wetland grasses have been able to keep up with the natural rate of sea-level rise but as the water height increases and speeds up that's going to be a problem for the the wetland grasses to keep up so since Louisiana is losing a football field of wetlands every hundred minutes what will the future look like there will be changed there will be loss the question is whether we will be able to keep up with the rates especially a sea level rise caused by global warming you [Music]

Channel: NOLA.com

Views: 13,207

Rating: 4.521739 out of 5

Keywords: nola.com, new orleans, times-picayune, louisiana, land loss, environtment, coastal restoration

Id: qIocxdf5tg0

Length: 2min 58sec (178 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 07 2017