An enormous replica of Mississippi's delta will help scientists to save the coastline

Many scientists are working to find a solution in the war against the rising seawater which is destroying the ecosystems of the Louisiana coastline. A team of researcher from Louisiana State University shows how they will figure it out: an huge replica of the lower Mississippi delta. 

The model is big 10,800 sq ft, more than twice the size of a regulation basketball court. It’s housed by the university in its center for river studies and it’s named the “Lower Mississippi River Physical Model”. Scientists will use this replica to draw a state plan to stop the seawater from the Gulf of Mexico.

Researchers want to bring nutrient-rich water of the Mississippi into marshes and wetlands recently filled with seawater. The river water should fix damages caused by the salt water on plants and animals. 

According to Clint Wilson, the professor who leads the studies, researchers «can now model or simulate the transport or the movement of the Mississippi river sand down the river», and they «can do all that in roughly one hour to replicate one year on the river».

Rudy Simoneaux, representing the state’s coastal protection and restoration authority, said that in many places lands has been totally erased by seawater. He claimed that Louisiana lost about 2,000 sq miles of coastline in the last 80 years. 

The scientist are now working to understand what impact will have their plans on the Mississippi delta’s zone and which solutions could be mixed together to solve the problem.

«What you do in one place has an impact on another - said Willson - and so the idea of looking at larger-scale impacts or larger-scale processes is critical to looking at what the potential impacts are or the unintended consequences of projects, and so a model of this scale allows you to do that».