Word: silting
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Geology has only made things worse. Gulf land is squishy stuff, made mostly of silt deposited by eons of free-flowing rivers and periodic floods. When the high water recedes, the sedimentary layer remains, growing heavier and heavier and ultimately subsiding under its own weight. The only way to keep the land from sinking altogether is to let the soil replenish itself with each flood. Human beings have done just the opposite, walling off New Orleans and re-engineering the Mississippi River to flow around the growing metropolis, effectively choking off the silt supply...
...disaster that left 700,000 people homeless from Illinois to Louisiana, the Corps leveed and streamlined the Mississippi. That effort turned the meandering, porous waterway into the world's largest high-pressure hose, shooting sediment and nutrients off the continental shelf in the Gulf of Mexico. Starved of silt and undermined by oil-drilling operations, the delta has been sinking at the same time global warming has caused water levels to rise. The result: every half an hour, a chunk of land about the size of a football field is lost to the Gulf. Every year 22,000 acres sink...
...officials are relieved that the flooding did not crack open the storage tanks of the large petrochemical factories south and east of the city, the waters still contain a poisonous mix of gasoline, household and industrial chemicals and stinking human waste. They will leave a layer of heavily contaminated silt everywhere. John Pardue, director of the Louisiana Water Resources Research Institute at Louisiana State University, says, "We're going to have to find out how deep the contamination is. Can we scrape it off, or are we going to have to replace topsoil...
Indeed, the bottom of the lake, a gray moonscape punctuated by boulders, rock-slides and l00-ft.-high sandstone walls, was teeming with life. Clouds of minute zooplankton drifted across the sub's windows like snowflakes. Burrowing burbot fish dug deep trenches in the silt, while sculpin fish created dimple-like holes as they nestled into the lake floor...
...harvested in Marlborough a mere 30 years ago. Mild, fruity whites are what the country is most associated with, but the long-held perception that New Zealand's terroir isn't suited to reds has finally been overcome by a number of wineries producing world-class Pinot Noir. The silt-loam soils of New Zealand yield a Pinot Noir somewhere between the robust Australian reds beloved of influential American critic Robert Parker and the more complex Bordeaux wines. Some Kiwi wineries have even taken on the Australian stranglehold on Shiraz, or Syrah as it's sometimes called. In the Hawke...