Is this ‘age of the delta’ coming to an end? – Knowable Magazine

Zeeland, Netherlands as seen from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission (courtesy of by the European Space Agency, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO via www.esa.int)

The land near the mouth of the Mississippi River is barely land at all. Muddy water forks into a labyrinth of pathways through a seemingly endless expanse of electric-green marsh grass, below skies thick with birds. Shrimp and crabs wriggle in the water below, and oak and cypress sprout from wet soils on higher grounds. Stretching for more than a hundred miles along the coast of Louisiana, this is one of the world’s largest, and most famous, river deltas…