The Disappearing Coast

Louisiana is losing itself. Every hour and a half, approximately one football field of coastal land sinks into the Gulf of Mexico. The state has lost more than two thousand square miles of coast since the nineteen thirties, a landmass roughly the size of Delaware, and the rate is accelerating.

What is happening here is the largest land-loss crisis in the United States, and its causes are both natural and the direct consequence of human decisions made over the past hundred years. The Mississippi River built Louisiana's coast for seven thousand years by depositing sediment across a shifting delta. The river changed course periodically, abandoning old delta lobes and building new ones, a process that maintained the coast as a whole even as individual areas subsided.

When the Army Corps of Engineers locked the Mississippi into its current channel with levees and control structures in the twentieth century, primarily to protect agriculture and navigation, they stopped the river's natural sediment delivery to the coast. The land that was no longer being replenished began to subside and drown. The oil and gas industry accelerated the process enormously.

Since the nineteen twenties, energy companies have dug more than ten thousand miles of canals through the Louisiana marsh, cutting access routes to wells and pipelines. Those canals killed the vegetation that held the marsh together, allowed saltwater to intrude into freshwater ecosystems, and accelerated subsidence. Scientists estimate that oil and gas extraction accounts for somewhere between thirty and fifty percent of the land loss.

The industry has extracted hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth from Louisiana's subsoil. The bill for the coast is still being calculated. Coastal communities, many of them Indigenous, are already relocating.

The Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw received federal funding in two thousand sixteen to move their entire community to higher ground inland, the first climate-driven managed retreat in American history. Others will follow. Louisiana is not waiting for the coast to disappear.

The coast is disappearing whether Louisiana waits or not.