Is It Feasible to Build New Land in the Mississippi River Delta?

What if the Mississippi River levees were cut below New Orleans? What if much of the water and sediment were allowed to flow out and build new deltas? Could deltaic land loss be reversed, and indeed restored? Using a conservative sediment supply rate and a range of rates of sea level rise and subsidence, a physically based model of deltaic river sedimentation Kim et al. , 2009 predicts that approximately 700–1200 square kilometers of new land (exposed surface and in‐channel freshwater habitat) could be built over a century (Figure 1).