InfrastructureA Mississippi river diversion helped build Louisiana wetlands

The extensive system of levees along the Mississippi River has done much to prevent devastating floods in riverside communities. The levees, however, have also contributed to the loss of Louisiana’s wetlands. By holding in floodwaters, they prevent sediment from flowing into the watershed and rebuilding marshes, which are compacting under their own weight and losing ground to sea-level rise.

Reporting in Nature Geoscience, a team of University of Pennsylvania geologists and others used the Mississippi River flood of the spring of 2011 to observe how floodwaters deposited sediment in the Mississippi Delta. Their findings offer insight into how new diversions in the Mississippi River’s levees may help restore Louisiana’s wetlands.

A University of Pennsylvania release reports that while scientists and engineers have previously proposed ways of altering the levee system to restore some of the natural wetland-building ability of the Mississippi, this is among the only large-scale experiments to demonstrate how these modifications might function.

The 2011 floods broke records across several states, damaged homes and crops and took several lives. The destruction was reduced, however, because the Army Corps of Engineers opened the Morganza Spillway, a river-control structure, for the first time since 1973 to divert water off of the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya River Basin. This action involved the deliberate flooding of more than 12,000 square kilometers and alleviated pressures on downstream levees and spared Baton Rouge and New Orleans from the worst of the flood.

For the Penn researchers, the opening of the Morganza Spillway provided a rare look into how floods along the Mississippi may have occurred before engineered structures were put in place to control the river’s flow.

“While this was catastrophic to the people living in the Atchafalaya Basin, it was also simulating – accidentally — the sort of natural flood that used to happen all the time,” Jerolmack said. “We were interested in how this sort of natural flooding scenario would differ from the controlled floods contained within levees that we normally see in the Delta.”

To capitalize on this opportunity, the team began examining satellite images showing the plume of sediment-laden water emerging from the mouths of the Atchafalaya and Mississippi rivers. They calculated the amount of sediment in the plumes for the duration of the flood based on the ocean color in the satellite images and calibrated these data to field samples taken from a boat in the Gulf of Mexico. Their boat sampling