Are shifts in Earth's crust causing New Orleans to sink?

Christian Science Monitor ^ | March 31, 2006 | Peter N. Spotts

[seacapn]

Hurricane Katrina's devastating strike on New Orleans last fall highlighted shortcomings in the city's levee system. It also focused attention another long-term problem: The city and the region around it are sinking.

New research suggests, however, that at least for nearby Michoud, La., the dominant driver pulling the region under may not be among the usual suspects: oil extraction, pumping groundwater to the surface, or diverting the Mississippi for navigation.

Instead, the King of Slump may be a deep fault that cuts across southeastern Louisiana and under Michoud. During the 1970s, the fault appears to have contributed from 50 to 73 percent of the subsidence in this section of Orleans parish, depending on the time period measured. If sustained over a century, that would equate to as much as a six-foot sea-level rise, independent of any increase tied to global warming.

[seacapn]

Even with new levees, the New Orleans basin might have more fundamental problems...

[Names Ash Housewares]

Still Bushs fault.

[GSlob]

Yep. The most fundamental one is the New Orleanity.

[Godzilla]

The city and the region around it are sinking.

The earth sucks.

[hflynn]

If you take the f out of shifts you have nailed it.

[RightWhale]

It's, like, OhmiGaaawd!, Bush's fault.

[caryatid]

Often where there is a fault ... one finds oil. I read just today that onshore exploration is booming in LA and would be even greater but for having to wait 8 months to obtain the use of a drilling rig.

So, perhaps we should accelerate exploration in the New Orleans area. Oodles of oil/gas have been found in the region before .... Put a lid on the environmentalist whackos ... and, use some of the bazillions of dollars pouring into the state to erect new drilling rigs .... Oil is big business and bound to be more profitable than tourism and gambling. Maybe returning that part of the state to the old ways of doing things might make some sense. The oil industry was a mainstay of the New Orleans economy until around 1980.

[Dinsdale]

New orleans is sinking because the organic matter in the swampy soil it was built on is slowly decomposing. Without new silt it will continue to sink.

It happens whenever you build on a swamp. There's nothing anybody can do about it.

[HangnJudge]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/11/18/60minutes/main1056304.shtml

For 300 years, the sea has been closing in on New Orleans. As the coastal erosion continues, it is estimated the city will be off shore in 90 years. Even in good weather, New Orleans is sinking.

We should be thinking about a gradual pullout of New Orleans, and starting to rebuild people’s homes, businesses and industry in places that can last more than 80 years,” says Tim Kusky, a professor of earth sciences at St. Louis University.

Kusky talks about a withdrawal of the city and explains that coastal erosion was thrown into fast forward by Katrina. He says by 2095, the coastline will pass the city and New Orleans will be what he calls a “fish bowl.”

“Because New Orleans is going to be 15 to 18 feet below sea level, sitting off the coast of North America surrounded by a 50- to 100-foot-tall levee system to protect the city,” explains Kusky.

He says the city will be completely surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico just 90 years from now.

[adorno]

Are shifts in Earth's crust causing New Orleans to sink?

Some day, 5,000 years from now, an underwater explorer will discover the lost city of.... New Orleans?!?!

[tet68]

He says the city will be completely surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico just 90 years from now.

OH the horror! Oh the humanity!
There must be something we can to to accelerate this process
before it's too late.

[B.O. Plenty]

Global warming....Heh heh heh....

will take care of N.O.

If the sea level rises by 6 feet...N.O. will be 6 feet under, so to speak....

[HangnJudge]

http://www.showmenews.com/2006/Jan/20060101News004.asp
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/25/time_to_move_to_higher_ground/

"If you were to ask me can we make the city safe so that what happened during Katrina will never happen again, my honest answer is ‘no,’ " Young said in an interview. "No matter what we do or how we re-engineer and no matter how many acres of wetlands we try to put back, the city is located in such a vulnerable position that this will happen again."

"What we have to do as a nation is to step back and look at the economics of the situation and decide whether it’s worth it to keep all of that infrastructure there," Young said.

[HangnJudge]

OH the horror! Oh the humanity! There must be something we can to to accelerate this process before it's too late.

Without question, the most efficient, effective, and thermodynamically stable way to perform this operation is to destroy the levees, dis-embank the Mississippi, and permit the delta country to return to it's pre-intervention state.

This is not however going to happen, for too many reasons; economic, social, political, and blunt self interest come to mind.

So the delta country will continue to deteriorate. Only until an adequate projection, say 100yr. has been done on this system will the decision processes change, demonstrating the effects, within a lifespan, of human activity, on human self interest.

[tertiary01]

Maybe a graben much like that which created Lake Tahoe.

[Brilliant]

Actually, New Orleans is not sinking. The rest of the world is rising.

[muawiyah]

Plus, there's this 7 to 14 mile deep fissure in the Earth that extends from offshore in the Gulf all the way to the Carmel Fault in Indiana.

Odds are the widening of the crack, and the resultant subsidance, are a late stage result of the Great Earthquake of 1812 with its center at New Madrid, Missouri.

The next "big one" will probably suck the whole New Orleans area down.

[HangnJudge]

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/328/2

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it's become widely known that New Orleans has been slowly sinking. Geologists have blamed oil drilling, groundwater pumping, and young, soft sediments for much of the region's subsidence, but a new study implicates another culprit. The deep shifting of tectonic plates may be causing the land to sink faster than the shallower manipulations of humans.


Sinking city.
Part of eastern New Orleans may be falling fast
because of the movement of a tectonic fault.
(Cooler colors indicate lower elevations.)

[chemicalman]

Wow. Just think of all the new artificial reefs that will be in New Orleans holding fish.

I'll be marking all the fishing hot spots on my GPS.

[Modok]

NOLA is sinking because it sucks.