Combination Of Rising Sea Levels And Subsiding Land Endanger Louisiana Coast

BATON ROUGE, LA - AUGUST 23: A map with locations showing land building projects, levees, floodgates, marsh creation, and barrier island restoration, shoreline protection, river diversions and coastal habitat improvements is displayed at the LSU Center For River Studies on August 23, 2019 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The facility includes a 10,000 square feet river model that opened in 2018. Scientists and students can send water and granules, representing sediment, down the model Mississippi River to simulate both coastal loss and restoration efforts and study the best ways to restore the fragile Mississippi Delta and coastal ecosystem. According to researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Louisiana's combination of rising waters and sinking land give it one of the highest rates of relative sea level rise on the planet. Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost over 2,000 square miles of land and wetlands, an area roughly the size of Delaware. In the past 30 years, as subsidence continues and the effects of climate change increase, Louisiana has been losing its coastal landscape at the rate of almost a football fields worth of land every hour. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)