Resculpting of shorelines by storms has become a popular research topic. A fact that has greatly befuddled scientists is that Louisiana lose on average a land area equal to about two football fields each hour to subsidence and sea level rises. What this is saying is that every hour, 200 yards of land are either covered by water or eroded on the coast of Louisiana. After hurricane Ike passed through Louisiana, it flushed away 3-meter tall ridges of shells and loose gravel 40-50 meters seaward and scoured as much as two-thirds of the ridges’ height. Fresh deposits of sand and mud stretched up to 15 kilometers offshore. The piles included about 300,000 cubic meters of sand from each kilometer of coastline. Previous studies of the seafloor in this area have suggested that material at water depths greater than 5 meters typically stays put under normal conditions, much of that sand probably won’t be coming back to shore. Along the Atlantic Coast, the shore erodes inland, on average, between 60 centimeters and a meter each year; annual rates of erosion along the Gulf Coast are double that. In southern Louisiana, a long term sinking, or subsidence-a phenomenon resulting from reduced deliveries of river sediment and the ongoing withdrawal of oil and gas from underground reservoirs-makes barrier islands unusually susceptible to storms.
This article is important to humans because the more coastal erosion that occur across the United States means less land for human beings to be able to live on which in thus means that more people will be cramped into smaller places. These discoveries are discovery based because the scientists that wrote this article used data from over the years and many different hurricanes to produce their thesis.
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