How long is louisiana shoreline

California has a 5, km long coastline on the Pacific Ocean to the west. Topping the bucket list of many travelers is a drive down the Pacific Coast Highway to experience all the beauty this area has to offer. North Carolina is home to over 5, km of coastline along the Atlantic Ocean to the east. The state is well-known for its barrier island beaches where visitors can watch both the sunrise as well as the sunset.

With a host of state parks, eateries, and golf courses, beachgoers return to North Carolina year after year. With 5, km of coastline along the Gulf of Mexico and year-round mild temperatures, it is no wonder that Texas is a popular beach destination. Well-known for Spring Breakers, the island does have quieter spots for those seeking a relaxing getaway.

Galveston Island may not be known for its pristine beaches but offer a selection of local attractions sure to please travelers to the area. Take a relaxing walk through Moody Gardens or visit Galveston Seawall, the largest contiguous sidewalk in the world. Jupiter and Hobe Sound, Florida, along the Atlantic Ocean coast, lined by the beach and dotted by luxury homes golf courses.

Indiana has the smallest coastline, at a mere 45 mi 72 km among the 30 states that have a coastline. Rank US State Coastline Length 1 Alaska 33, mi 54, km 2 Florida 8, mi 13, km 3 Louisiana 7, mi 12, km 4 Maine 3, mi 5, km 5 California 3, mi 5, km 6 North Carolina 3, mi 5, km 7 Texas 3, mi 5, km 8 Virginia 3, mi 5, km 9 Michigan 3, mi 5, km 10 Maryland 3, mi 5, km 11 Washington 3, mi 4, km 12 South Carolina 2, mi 4, km 13 New York 2, mi 4, km 14 Georgia 2, mi 3, km 15 New Jersey 1, mi 2, km 16 Massachusetts 1, mi 2, km 17 Oregon 1, mi 2, km 18 Hawaii 1, mi 1, km 19 Wisconsin mi 1, km 20 Connecticut mi km 21 Alabama mi km 22 Rhode Island mi km 23 Delaware mi km 24 Mississippi mi km 25 Ohio mi km 26 Minnesota mi km 27 Pennsylvania mi km 28 New Hampshire mi km 29 Illinois 63 mi km 30 Indiana 45 mi 72 km.

Lisa Medeiros September 8 in World Geography. Pantanal, Brazil. What Is A Plateau? In , coastal engineers used oil spill recovery funds to rebuild the small island , which is a key nesting ground for brown pelicans. Biologists expect the refurbished island to provide habitat for tens of thousands of pelican nesting pairs. A similar project, completed in , rebuilt the ailing Pelican Island in the eastern part of the bay.

More recently, coastal engineers are starting to work on a new project to reinforce and expand Grand Terre, a fast-eroding barrier island that was once a base for the famed French pirate, slave trader, and Battle of New Orleans war hero Jean Lafitte. There has been some positive news for Barataria Bay. A major effort to divert water and sediment from the main channel of the Mississippi River into the bay is nearing construction.

Meanwhile, research indicates that the rate of land loss and subsidence has slowed in recent years. After losing as much as 10 square miles 25 square kilometers per year in the early s, the loss has averaged less than 2 square miles 5 square kilometers in recent years. The reduction is likely due to a pause in the number of damaging hurricanes, a possible reduction in the natural rate of subsidence, and a decline in impacts from oil extraction, according to U.

Geologic Survey researchers. The delta would still be losing land because of the accelerating rate of sea level rise. Geological Survey.

Story by Adam Voiland. View this area in EO Explorer. While there are efforts to reinforce its beaches and marshes, some of Barataria Bay is slowly slipping away. Flying at an altitude of two thousand feet, I could make out the houses and farms and refineries that fill the strips, though not the people who live or work in them.

Beyond was open water or patchy marsh. In many spots, the patches were crisscrossed with channels. Presumably, these had been dug when the land was firmer, to get at the oil underneath. In some places, I could see the outlines of what were once fields and are now rectilinear lakes. Great white clouds, billowing above the plane, were mirrored in the black pools below.

Plaquemines has the distinction—a dubious one, at best—of being among the fastest-disappearing places on Earth. Everyone who lives in the parish—and fewer and fewer people do—can point to some stretch of water that used to have a house or a hunting camp on it. This is true even of teen-agers. A few years ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially retired thirty-one Plaquemines place-names, including Bay Jacquin and Dry Cypress Bayou, because there was no there there anymore.

Since the days of Huey Long, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand square miles. If Delaware or Rhode Island had lost that much territory, the U. On maps, the state may still resemble a boot. Really, though, the bottom of the boot is in tatters, missing not just a sole but also its heel and a good part of its instep. But the essential one is a marvel of engineering. Thousands of miles of levees, flood walls, and revetments have been erected to manage the Mississippi.

But if control is the problem it must also, by the logic of the Anthropocene, be the solution. And so a huge new public-works project is getting under way—this one aimed not at flood control so much as at controlled flooding.

Ten pharaonic structures are planned. The furthest along of these is slated for Plaquemines Parish. It will feature enough concrete and riprap to pave Greenwich Village and, when operating at full capacity, will, by flow, be the twelfth-largest river in the country.

In one form or another, the Mississippi has been winding its way to the Gulf for millions of years. All the while, it has been carrying on its broad back vast loads of sediment—at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, some four hundred million tons annually.

Eliot wrote. Whenever it overtopped its banks—something it used to do virtually every spring—the river cast its sediment across the plain. Season after season, layer after layer, clay and sand and silt built up. Because the Mississippi is always dropping sediment, it is always on the move, seeking new and faster routes to the sea. Its most dramatic leaps are called avulsions. In the last seven thousand years, the river has avulsed six times, and each time it has set about laying down a new bulge of land.

Western Terrebonne Parish is the remains of a delta lobe built during the time of the Phoenicians. The city of New Orleans sits on a lobe—the St. Bernard—created around the time of the pyramids. Many still more ancient lobes are now submerged. The next avulsion is now overdue. Only human invention, in the form of steel and concrete, stands in its way. Meanwhile, as the Mississippi has pushed lobe after lobe into the sea, the sea has pushed back.

Where the river delivers enough sand and clay to make up for the lost volume, the land holds its own. Where compaction outpaces accretion, the land begins to subside until, eventually, the Gulf reclaims it.

Such a mutable landscape is a hard one to settle. Nevertheless, Native Americans were probably living in the delta even as it was being created. If the Mississippi flooded, they sought higher ground. If it shifted quarters, they did, too. When the French arrived, they consulted with the tribes living there.

In , the fort was abandoned. Bienville went on to found New Orleans, in , in spite of his cold, wet feet. Counterintuitively, this was right up against the Mississippi. During floods, sand and other heavy particles tend to settle out of the water first, creating what are known as natural levees. The settlement remained submerged for six months.

Rather than retreat again, the French dug in. They started cutting drainage channels through the muck and raising artificial barriers atop the natural ones. Most of this backbreaking labor was performed by African slaves.

By the seventeen-thirties, slave-built levees stretched along both banks of the river for nearly fifty miles.

These early levees, made of earth reinforced with timber, failed frequently. But they established a pattern that endures to the present day. With each failure, the levees were improved—built higher and wider and longer. By the War of , they ran along the river for more than a hundred and fifty miles. A few days after I flew over Plaquemines, I found myself once again gazing down on the parish. If the water kept rising and the spillway failed to open, the city and the parishes downriver from it would be inundated.

I was with several engineers, and they were starting to get nervous. I was anxious, too, though only a little, since the Mississippi we were looking at was about five inches wide. There are large puddles representing Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne, which are not really lakes but, rather, brackish lagoons.

More puddles represent Barataria Bay and Breton Sound, inlets of the Gulf, and still more puddles represent various bayous and backwaters. I pulled off my shoes and tried to walk from New Orleans to the Gulf. By the time I got to English Turn, my feet were wet. I stuffed my soggy socks into my pocket. The model delta, which represents a kind of relief map of the future, is supposed to simulate flooding and sea-level rise and to help test strategies for dealing with them.

At the time of my visit, the model was so new that it was still being calibrated. This involved running simulations of well-studied disasters from the past, like the flood of In the spring of that year, heavy snowmelt combined with weeks of intense rain across the Midwest, resulting in record-breaking water levels.

On the model, the spillway gates were represented by small strips of brass attached to copper wires. He looked like a latter-day Gulliver, bent over a drowning Lilliput.

He, too, I noticed, had wet socks. In the world of the model, time—as well as space—contracts. On its accelerated schedule, a year passes in an hour, a month in five minutes. As I watched the weeks race by, the river kept rising. Water began flowing out of the Mississippi into Lake Pontchartrain, and New Orleans was saved, at least for now.

Two separate vats served as the source for the mini-Mississippi. One provided clear water. The other held the mud of the Little Muddy, though not real mud. This was simulated sediment, imported from France and composed of exactingly milled plastic pellets—teensy, half-millimetre-wide pellets for large grains of sand and even teensier ones to represent finer particles.

The sediment was jet black and stood out against the foam riverbed and surrounding terrain, which were painted bright white. During the mock flood, some of the dark pellets had been flushed down the spillway, into Lake Pontchartrain. Most had swooshed out past New Orleans and around English Turn. This inky mix was streaming in dark eddies toward the Gulf of Mexico, where, had it been real sediment, it would have vanished off the coast.

Had the river been left to its own devices, a super-wet spring like that of would have sent the Mississippi and its distributaries surging over their banks. The floodwaters would have wreaked havoc, but they would have spread tens of millions of tons of sand and clay across thousands of square miles of countryside.

The new sediment would have formed a fresh layer of soil and, in this way, countered subsidence. Thanks to the intervention of the engineers, there had been no spillover, no havoc, and hence no land-building. The future of southern Louisiana had, instead, washed out to sea. The storm claimed an additional three hundred lives in other states. As we chatted, someone flipped a switch controlling projectors in the ceiling. Suddenly, the fields of Plaquemines turned green and the Gulf blue.

The effect was dazzling, if also a little unnerving, as when Dorothy steps out of sepia-toned Kansas into Oz. He was wearing a shirt embroidered with the C. Much of Plaquemines lies below sea level—six feet under, people sometimes say.

This arrangement is made possible by four sets of levees. Two run along the river, one on each bank. The levees, which keep water out, also keep water in. When they are breached or overtopped, Plaquemines fills up like a pair of long, skinny bathtubs. Plaquemines was devastated by Katrina , which made landfall in Buras, and then was ravaged again, just a few weeks later, by Hurricane Rita, the most intense storm ever recorded over the Gulf.

For months after these back-to-back disasters, Route 23 was blocked by washed-up fishing boats. Dead cows hung from the trees. In anticipation of the next catastrophe, public buildings in the parish stand on improbable pilings. Where other schools might have a gym or a ground-floor cafeteria, South Plaquemines High has enough empty space to park a fleet of tractor trailers. Many of the homes in the parish have been similarly elevated.