Evaluating Land Subsidence Rates and Their Implications for Land Loss in the Lower Mississippi River Basin

Abstract

High subsidence rates, along with eustatic sea-level change, sediment accumulation and shoreline erosion have led to widespread land loss and the deterioration of ecosystem health around the Lower Mississippi River Basin (LMRB). A proper evaluation of the spatial pattern of subsidence rates in the LMRB is the key to understanding the mechanisms of the submergence, estimating its potential impacts on land loss and the long-term sustainability of the region. Based on the subsidence rate data derived from benchmark surveys from 1922 to 1995, this paper constructed a subsidence rate surface for the region through the empirical Bayesian kriging (EBK) interpolation method. The results show that the subsidence rates in the region ranged from 1.7 to 29 mm/year, with an average rate of 9.4 mm/year. Subsidence rates increased from north to south as the outcome of both regional geophysical conditions and anthropogenic activities. Four areas of high subsidence rates were found, and they are located in Orleans, Jefferson, Terrebonne and Plaquemines parishes. A projection of future landscape loss using the interpolated subsidence rates reveals that areas below zero elevation in the LMRB will increase from 3.86% in 2004 to 19.79% in 2030 and 30.88% in 2050. This translates to a growing increase of areas that are vulnerable to land loss from 44.3 km 2 /year to 240.7 km 2 /year from 2011 to 2050. Under the same scenario, Lafourche, Plaquemines and Terrebonne parishes will experience serious loss of wetlands, whereas Orleans and Jefferson parishes will lose significant developed land, and Lafourche parish will endure severe loss of agriculture land.

Artificial Intelligence-Enhanced Decision Support for Informing Global Sustainable Development: A Human-Centric AI-Thinking Approach

“…Researchers in the field of sustainability have also utilized the Bayesian approach [36,37]. This helps them to quantify mutual information, as espoused in Claude Shannon's Information Theory [38], which measures the probabilistic amount of commonality between two distributions of data that may not be parametric.…”

Hurricanes as a Major Driver of Coastal Erosion in the Mississippi River Delta: A Multi-Decadal Analysis of Shoreline Retreat Rates at Bay Champagne, Louisiana (USA)

“…The average rate of relative sea-level rise at Grand Isle, LA (located at the eastern end of the headland) is about 1 cm/yr [9,24]. Subsidence rates, which contribute to relative sea-level rise rates, are also quite high in this region, with estimates ranging from 5-12 mm/yr [25,26]. Over the past century, the headland has subsided nearly 2.5 m [27].…”

Measuring Spatiotemporal Features of Land Subsidence, Groundwater Drawdown, and Compressible Layer Thickness in Beijing Plain, China

“…In most areas worldwide, compressible sediments are the material basis and it unbalances the starting point of land subsidence; groundwater drawdown is an inherent drive and its spatial diversity induces an uneven development process of land subsidence [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. Land subsidence has increased the risk of other disasters and threatened the properties of the society [12][13][14][15].…”