Losing Louisiana
The Time-Picayune is featuring a three part series entitled Losing Lousiana. It’s well worth the read, and although pretty depressing it brings up many important points about the state of coastal erosion on the Gulf Coast.
In 50 to 100 years, the numbers tell them, rising seas caused by global warming, combined with the steady subsidence of Louisiana’s coast, will lift the Gulf of Mexico two to six feet higher in many areas surrounding New Orleans.
Such a rise would overwhelm the most ambitious coastal restoration plans now under way and submerge almost everything in southeast Louisiana outside hurricane levees. And that means the areas inside the levees essentially would become coastline, far more vulnerable to hurricanes and continuing coastal erosion, and in need of a far more drastic and expensive flood protection apparatus.
Read the entire first installment here.
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