After getting my salad to go, I drove into the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest swamp in the United States. For miles and miles interstate 10 is suspended over this beautiful expanse of wetlands and bald cypress trees.
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Guess what? Big Oil couldn't resist messing with this big swamp.
ReplyDeleteThe coastal salt marshes (of Atchafalya) form a buffer zone protecting the entire coast of Louisiana from the effects of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and dissipating their accompanying storm surges. The marshes depend on replenishment from deposited silt, which is now being deposited over the edge of the continental shelf, due to the artificially canalized flow of the Mississippi. From the 1950s through 1970s, the oil industry dredged deep channels into the marsh so that they could move barges in as work platforms. The edges continued to degrade, until wide shallow channels in the saltmarsh have resulted