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Land Making Machines

  • Brian Davis (author)
Chapter of: Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life(pp. 115–122)

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Metadata
TitleLand Making Machines
ContributorBrian Davis (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0014.1.19
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/making-the-geologic-now/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
CopyrightDavis, Brian
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2012-12-04
Long abstractCubits Gap is a major subdelta of the Mississippi River. The gap formed in 1862 after an oyster fisherman, Cubit, and his daughters excavated a small ditch in the levee between the River and the oyster-rich Bay Ronde. Intending to make an easier portage for their rowboat, they created a small crevasse. In springtime, meltwater poured through it. Six years later the crevasse was 2,427 feet wide [Ref. 1]. By 1940 a landmass larger than New Orleans had been created and the Bay Ronde had completely disappeared. Today the Cubits Gap subdelta is 40,000 acres of National Wildlife Refuge and is quickly subsiding back into the Gulf of Mexico, a microcosm of the dynamism and potentiality of the Mississippi River as the great land making machine [LMM].1This LMM built the Mississippi Delta over the last 5,000 years with the massive slurry loads it transports from the heart of the continent to the Gulf of Mexico. It is estimated that before 1930, this load was about 400 million tons of sediment per year [Ref. 2]. Since 1930, this load has decreased significantly. Current estimates range from 145 million to 230 million tons per year. This reduction can be explained, in part, by the 1936 Flood Control Act and the decision by Congress to reconstruct the river as a flood control and navigation system on a continental scale.2 Despite this massive reduction, the LMM still discharges sediment at a rate roughly equal to that of the next six largest rivers in the United States combined [Ref. 3]. Most of this sediment is no longer used to continuously build the delta. Rather, thanks to the 1870’s engi-neering of Capt. James Eads, it is shot out into deepwater in the Gulf of Mexico.3 Since 1930 a landmass approximating the size of Delaware has been lost from the Louisiana coast [Ref. 4]. But the potential of the LMM remains.
Page rangepp. 115–122
Print length8 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)