By the time a child born this year is 41 years old, Louisiana will have lost 2600 square miles of the coastal land it had in 1932. Unless something is done and done quickly, the Gulf of Mexico will be visible from downtown Houma before many people reading this are too terribly old. Below are some links with information about land loss and coastal erosion.
National Wetlands Research Center: Louisiana Coastal Land Loss
Louisiana Department of Resources: Louisiana Coastal Facts
Animation: The Rise and Disappearance of Coastal Louisiana (Requires Flash 8)
BTNEP: The Barataria National Estuary Program
Restore or Retreat
Louisiana Coastal Wetlands Blog
Len Bahr's LA Coast Post--Home to many, many more good links.
Landsat: Coastal Erosion in Real Time
Finally, take a look at the Landsat archives and the Global Visualization Viewer (GLOVIS) to see the picture from space. Landsat is a landform-cataloguing satellite that flies over us, takes digital photographs of the planet and beams them down.
To look at current images of our coastline, just enter 28.9 in the latitude box and -90.5 in the longitude box. To look at older images, click on the pulldown menu that says "Landsat 7 SLC-Off (2003->)" and pick an older mission. "Landsat 1-3 MSS" is from 1972 to 1982, "Landsat 4-5 MSS" is from 1982 to 1992 and "Landsat 7 SLC-Off" is from 1999 to 2003.
Those little abbreviations on the pulldown menu (MSS, SLC) stand for technical stuff on the Landsat Satellite. Read more about it here:
What Does "SLC OFF" Mean?
What Does MSS Stand For?
What Does TM Stand For?
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