The Chris Moeller Archives

Nature's course

I saw a lot of the Mississippi River on my road trip to New Orleans last week, and there's a lot of the Mississippi River to see. Flood waters were trickling over the interstate (and under my car tires) north of Memphis on Monday. This weekend, thousands have been evacuated in the Cajun country of Central Louisiana so that a spillway might be unlocked and opened, and greater damage averted downriver in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

And now do you want to read something even more troubling? I came across this one the day we arrived home. Some experts predict that the Great River may be about to shift course, choking off both Louisiana's capital city and it's largest by population. Although the river's course has changed radically and multiple times throughout the planet's history, New Orleans has been the drainpipe of the river for so long that the city is actually built, not upon bedrock, but on vast quantities of packed mud and clay that the river has carried down to the gulf. (That's Iowa soil under the Bourbon Street cobblestone.) We're not just talking about its commerce and its culture when we say that the river literally provided the foundation for the city and the near-entirety of Southern Louisiana.

posted by CM @ 11:16 PM