‘Spring high water often knocks the sign away’ |May 17, 2011|
Atchafalaya Basin, Louisiana From The New Yorker: The
Mississippi River, with its sand and silt, has created most of
Louisiana, and it could not have done so by remaining in one
channel. If it had, southern Louisiana would be a long narrow
peninsula reaching into the Gulf of Mexico. Southern Louisiana
exists in its present form because the Mississippi River has
jumped here and there within an arc about two hundred miles
wide, like a pianist playing with one hand—frequently and
radically changing course, surging over the left or the right
bank to go off in utterly new directions. Always it is the
river’s purpose to get to the Gulf by the shortest and steepest
gradient. As the mouth advances southward and the river
lengthens, the gradient declines, the current slows, and
sediment builds up the bed. Eventually, it builds up so much
that the river spills to one side. Major shifts of that nature
have tended to occur roughly once a millennium. The Missis