Investigate factors contributing to land loss in Louisiana:

Over the past 80 years, development activities like oil and gas extraction, navigation canals, and flood control levees have contributed, alongside sea level rise and subsidence, to unprecedented land loss in coastal Louisiana.

A coastwide problem

At some point in the past 80 years, every region in the coast has experienced some degree of land loss, with some areas losing a much greater proportion of their land than others. As this chart shows, at various times, basins started to regain land, only to lose it again from storms or further development. One notable exception is the Atchafalaya basin, which has steadily been gaining land. The Wax Lake Delta there has proven a model for the kinds of restoration projects the state wants to invest in.

Legal controversy

Canals are at the center of what has been called 'the most ambitious environmental lawsuit ever.' The levee board responsible for protecting New Orleans has filed suit against over 90 oil and gas firms, claiming that they failed to meet the conditions of their environmental permits to fill-in canals after extraction operations ceased. The case of Delacroix has featured prominently in the suit. The Texaco Canals area starkly illustrates the impact of industry operations. Click here to explore.

Boom and bust

Over the past century, the State of Louisiana has permitted hundreds of thousands of wells for extracting oil and gas. While in boom years these wells provided jobs and incomes to many, not only do modern wells operating today impact a variety of ecosystems, old wells have left their own legacy. Many leak, contaminating nearby property, while others have been implicated in the tremendous land loss the state is experiencing. This map shows how many wells were permitted in each parish (or, county) in the state in the past 100 or so years. By clicking on the icons below, you can focus in on a particular "boom."
SOURCES: Land loss data - Couvillion et al., 2013 (USGS); Spoil banks data - Pate, 2014; Oil and gas well data - SONRIS; Texaco Canals - Marshall et al. 2014 (http://projects.propublica.org/louisiana/); Other background - Scaife et al., 1983; Cahoon and Turner, 1989; Barry, 1997; E. Turner, 1997; Ko and Day, 2004; Blum and Roberts, 2009; Engle, 2011; Batker et al., 2014; Goldenberg, 2014; Muth, 2014; Theriot, 2014;