Sliced, Sinking & Starved For Sediment, Coastal Louisiana Going Fast - 1 Manhattan Every Year
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Louisiana 1 is also the only road to Port Fourchon, the southernmost port in Louisiana, which supports 90% of the nation's offshore oil and gas rigs. Vulnerable to flooding, the highway is the key to 18% of the nation's oil production, according to January's draft of the federal National Climate Assessment report. "Every time there is a high tide or any storm, that road goes out," Fischbach says.
And one final problem: Four major hurricanes — Katrina (2005), Rita (2005), Gustav (2008) and Ike (2011) — have battered the region since 2005. Eroded, inundated, cut up by oil company canals and even gnawed to the roots by invasive South American rodents called nutria ("They eat marshland in its entirety," Keim says), the wetlands' ability to halt these goliaths' storm surges has been undermined.
The same warming ocean waters that are slowly rising also look likely to deliver more powerful hurricanes to these shores. A 2010 Nature Geosciences study led by Thomas Knutson of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., concluded that future storms would be as much as 11% more intense in this century, dropping about 20% more rain within 60 miles of their center.
On the plus side, global warming might mean that fewer storms form — as many as 34% fewer — in the years ahead. So we might see fewer, meaner storms, across the planet. Though the frequency question is one of the many unsettled areas of climate science, as some experts such as MIT's Kerry Emanuel predict a proliferation of storms with these warmer conditions.
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http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/06/climate-hurricanes-wetlands-global-warming/2595657/