This law has been around for a very long time, nothing new. Once the area becomes navigatable water, ownership transfers. Now, could they have done something to protect their land?
“Louisiana loses a football field of land every 100 minutes.”
Is this even correct?
If oil is causing this, what caused the continental shift?
The cause of all this is the flood control measures along the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Without the levees and the many other attempts to control the Big Muddy, New Orleans would be a landlocked city and the waters of the Mississippi would be flowing down the Atchafalaya River. Without the levees, these rivers would flood most years depositing sediment that would cause the marshes to be rejuvenated and sold land would also grow.
All of the sediment that would protect and grow the marshes and the solid land now flow all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, leaving enough between the levees to require constant dredging to keep a navigable channel up to Baton Rouge.
So, dis problem is not jus Thibodeaux, but son ami Boudreaux done got da same ole problem. So what dey gonna do?
From an article posted back in 2011...
http://www.nola.com/environment/index.ssf/2011/06/louisiana_is_losing_a_football.html
He also wishes people would say “wetlands” rather than “land.” His report was about
marshes and swamps, not the firm, dry stuff that some people might imagine is breaking
apart and falling into the ocean, one football field at a time.
Mark Twain said it best....
“A humorous treatment of the rigid uniformitarian view came from Mark Twain. Although the shortening of the Mississippi River he referred to was the result of engineering projects eliminating many of the bends in the river, it is a thought-provoking spoof:
The Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. . . . Its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present.
Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and “let on” to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past . . . what an opportunity is here!
Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from! . . .
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod.
And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. . . . There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
One of the issues is that to drill all the wells back in the marshes, the oil companies would dredge channels back to the location so that a barge rig could be used to drill the well. It is too swampy for a conventional land- based rig. These channels allow salt water to encroach into the swamp and it kills the marsh. Without the vegetation, the silt washes away.
Just let me know when the land around Cafe du Monde washes away. I’d love to claim the store that makes those great bignets