Most of it is due to the Mississippi River levee. The landscape here always has been changeable. The country that brought a sea back to life. An ambitious plan to stop the land from sinking.The slowdown, however, isn’t guaranteed to continue. “In recent years it’s reached a slowdown, but that’s because the most vulnerable spots are already gone,” says Seth Blitch, director of coastal and marine conservation at the Nature Conservancy of Louisiana. It’s partly because of restoration activities. This is largely because there hasn’t been a major hurricane since 2008. A football field is now being swallowed every 100 minutes, rather than every 34 minutes, when it was at its peak. It’s true that the rate of loss has slowed. From 1932 to 2016 in Louisiana, on average, open water subsumed a chunk of wetlands the size of a football field every hour. The salt marsh is also a landscape that is changing, fast. The wetlands at Biloxi Marsh – a web of bayous, brackish and salt lakes in south-east Louisiana that give way to Eloi Bay, Chandeleur Sound and, finally, to the Gulf of Mexico – help protect even New Orleans, 45 miles away. They are home to key infrastructure, like the pipes that carry oil and gas from the largest US entry port for waterborne crude oil all the way up to Knoxville, Tennessee and Washington DC.Īnd although the precise magnitude of their effect is still being debated, they are a natural barrier against storm surge, hurricanes and flooding. These waving grasses along the Gulf of Mexico underpin Louisiana’s seafood industry, the country’s second-largest behind Alaska. In Louisiana, where wetlands make up one-third of the state by area, the landscape plays a pivotal role. A salt marsh is an exquisitely complex ecosystem. It is easy, if you don’t know any better, to think that the world of the wetlands is simple, steadfast, still. Later, I’m equally startled to see an alligator lazing in the shallows. As we motor along the coast, a flock of egrets flutters into the air, startled by the only humans in sight. From the boat, the salt marsh looks pristine: cloud-dotted sky, brown-blue water, gold-green grass.
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