Mouth of a river meets an ocean, sea, estuary, lake, or reservoir
Sediment carried by a river is deposited as the flow leaves its mouth
Deposition builds the characteristic geographic pattern of a river delta
Visualization concept for Wax Lake Delta and the coastal crisis of Louisiana. This video explores methods and techniques employed to represent coastal growth from a river diversion as a means to combat land loss.
Learn moreThe protosystem inputs large data sets from the host environment. Reading water depth and velocity, types of terrain, vegetation and possibilities to increase sedimentation, the agents highlight different potentials in the site .
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The delta plain of the Mississippi River is disappearing. The coastal land in Louisiana loses a football field’s worth of land every hour. That’s as if most of Delaware had sunk into the sea.
Though land losses are widely distributed across the coastal plain of Louisiana, Atchafalaya Bay stands as a notable exception. New land is forming at the mouths of the Wax Lake Outlet and the Atchafalaya River. Wax Lake Outlet is an artificial channel that diverts some of the river’s flow into the bay about 16 kilometers (10 miles) west of where the main river empties.The series of satellite images chronicles the growth of the two deltas between 1984 and 2014. Water appears dark blue; vegetation is green; bare ground is pink.
Both deltas are being built by sediment carried by the Atchafalaya River. The Atchafalaya is a distributary of the Mississippi River, connecting to the “Big Muddy” in south central Louisiana near Simmesport.
Source: NASA Earth Observatory
The Wax Lake Delta is a river delta in Louisiana that was formed by rapid deposition of sediment following the creation of a canal through Wax Lake off of the Atchafalaya River in 1942
