LOUISIANA K. Meyer-Arendt Department of Geography
65. USA--LOUISIANA K. Meyer-Arendt D.W. Davis Department of Geography Department of Earth Science Mississippi State University Nicholls State University Starkville, Mississippi 38759 Thibodaux, Louisiana 70301 United States of America United States of America INTRODUCTION Louisiana's 40,000 Inn 2 coastal zone developed over the last 7,000 years by the progradation, aggradation, and accretion of sediments introduced via various courses of the Mississippi River (Frazier 1967). The deltaic plain (32,000 km'), through which the modern river cuts diagon ally !Fig , 1), consists of vast wetlands and waterbodies. With eleva tions ranging from sea level up to 1.5 m, it is interrupted by natural levee ridges which decrease distally until they disappear beneath the marsh surface. The downdrift chenier plain of southwest Louisiana (8,000 km') consists of marshes, large round-to-oblong lakes, and stranded, oak covered beach ridges known as cheniers (Howe et al. 1935). This landscape is the result of alternating long-term phases of shoreline accretion and erosion that were dependent upon the proximit of an active sediment-laden river, and a low-energy marine environment (Byrne et al. 1959). Since the dyking of the Mississippi River, fluvial sedimentation in the deltaic plain has effectively been halted. Today, most Missis sippi River sediment is deposited on the outer continental shelf; only at the mouth of the Atchafalaya River distributary is deltaic sedimen tation subaerially significant (Adams and Baumann 1980). Over mos of the coastal zone, subsidence, saltwater intrusion, wave erosion, canalization, and other hydrologic modification have led to a rapid increase in the surface area of water (Davis 1986, Walker e al.
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