New Orleans Is Sinking And Scientists Say The City Is A Terminal Case

The Tragically Hip were right: New Orleans 
IS sinking, and some researchers say the
will no longer be viable in a century or 
less because of rising sea levels
and climate change 

 Back in 1989, the fantastic Canadian band Tragically Hip released one of their greatest songs, called "New Orleans Is Sinking."   

Turns out the band was pretty prescient. 

New Orleans has always been in, at best, a standoff with the Gulf of Mexico. The low lying city has always been prone to coastal flooding, especially in recent decades as the land itself sinks and climate change has begun to raise sea levels. 

Now, we're seeing new headlines, like the lede in this story from The Guardian: 

"The process of relocating people from New Orleans should start immediately, as the city has reached 'a point of  no return' that will see it surrounded buy the ocean within decades due to the climate crisis, a start new study has concluded."

The fossil fuel industry that is an important part of Louisiana's economy is to blame. The coastline is subsiding, sinking downward in large part by the effects of the oil and gas industry. Along with man-made levees and diversions along the Mississippi River that means silt from the river doesn't replenish the land along the coastline. 

"The delta loses roughly a football field worth of land every half hour to an hour,"  according to PBS. 

The new research says southern Louisiana will deal with three to seven meters (roughly 10 to 23 feet) sea level rise which would drown land surrounding New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

"Ultimately the main message of the study is New Orleans is not forever and we have to plan for our future and we have to start planning now," aid Dr. Torbjorn Tomqvist, a geology professor at Tulane University and lead author of the study. 

The research harkens back to a time 125,000 years ago, when the Gulf of Mexico shoreline was north of Lake Pontchartrain, about 30 miles north of New Orleans. 

In those days, global temperatures were about 0.5 to 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels and seas were 10 to 20 feet higher than today, notes Fox8 News in New Orleans. 

Climate change through the use of fossil fuels have made the world at least as warm as it was 125,000 years ago. "Tornqvist said that because of the increasing rate of sea level rise, combined with subsidence or the rate of sinking land, the Gulf one day reach that ridge again, putting much of Southeast Louisiana underwater," Fox8 News continued.

Jesse Keenan, one the paper's five co-authors said New Orleans is going to go away, no matter what. As for how long New Orleans will last, Keenan said it is likely decades, not centuries. Though they stress it's not imminent. The city won't drown this year or this decade, but several decades from now. 

"Even if you stopped climate change today, New Orlean's days are still numbered....It will be surrounded by open water, and you can't keep an island situated below sea level afloat. There's no amount of money that can do that," Keenan said.

Keenan summed it up with this gloomy assessment. "New Orleans is in terminal condition, and we need to be clear with the patient that it is terminal.....There is an opportunity for palliative care, we can transition people and the economy. We can get ahead of this."

The researchers said city, state and federal leaders should start working now to help people move away from New Orleans and environs. They recommend a coordinated effort, starting with the most vulnerable committees. The top suggestion is Plaquemines Parish, where many people live outside the levee system. 

Land loss to the sea is already driving depopulation along Louisiana's coastal areas. That area has lost residents since 2000, especially after big hurricanes. That population loss has a good chance of accelerating as the land continues to disappear and hurricanes continue to battler the Gulf Coast.