Word: sedimenting
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...nearest dune. "Almost as good as a footprint in wet sand," Webb says. Since the 2003 find, which was announced last December, his team has uncovered around 460 human prints crisscrossing the site like the traces of a peak-hour crowd, many deeply impressed in the sediment, clearly showing where mud once squished between toes. From their size and the distance between them, Webb and his team have formed a rough picture of 23 individuals who traversed what would have been a wet landscape between 19,000 and 23,000 years ago. A child wanders alone, a little...
...Today the landscape they knew looks empty but for lonely turrets of sediment eaten away by the weather and dunes shimmering under a scalding sky. Parched flocks of galahs drift on the hot wind. Yet the Willandra Lakes region, which in 1981 became a 240,000-hectare World Heritage Area, has in the past 30 years yielded astounding archaeological treasures. In 1968 the dunes surrendered Mungo Lady, the skeletal remains of a young woman whose burial site remains the oldest evidence of cremation ever found. The ocher-covered bones of the world's oldest known ritual burial, Mungo Man, were...
...series of ponds, extends far beneath it. "They were in a hurry," he says of the hunters, "and I'd love to catch up with them." He believes the tracks were probably made within a matter of months and preserved when protective layers of silty clay covered the muddy sediment. And it's likely that more tracks remain on several underlying layers. "It's like a layer of pancakes," he says, "and we can only see the jam on the top." Other unusual marks could be from implements; Aboriginal trackers from northern Australia are being called in to see what...
...such force is the Mississippi River. Once, the Gulf of Mexico extended north to Cape Girardeau, Mo., but the river gradually deposited enough sediment into a receding sea to create tens of thousands of square miles of land stretching south to the present mouth of the river. Long after New Orleans was first settled, the entire region remained above sea level and safe from hurricanes. Engineers prevented river floods by building levees and kept shipping channels open by constructing jetties two miles out into the ocean so that the river dropped its sediment into deep water. Before the jetties were...
...problem. His idea: to redirect a branch of the Mississippi through the heart of Terrebonne Parish, the most densely populated in the delta. Shipping lanes would remain routed through New Orleans, but much of the Mississippi would be diverted at Donaldsonville, 90 miles upriver from the city, so sediment-rich waters could revive the ancient riverbeds in the central delta and rebuild marshland long since lost to the Gulf. Many local groups, including the Terrebonne-based Restore or Retreat, support the idea. One major impediment: parish residents who for generations have built homes and planted sugar-cane crops along...