land-making-machine – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: land-making-machine

September 3, 2011 – 6:00 am

instant island

[As this summer’s flooding swept massive sediment loads down the Mississippi, it also sent much greater volumes than usual pouring through the Corps’ diversion projects.  In the case of the West Bay Sediment Diversion (pictured in our previous post), the Times-Picayune notes, that volume carried enough sediment to construct an instant island: “In a demonstration […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, floods | Comments Off on instant island | Permalink
September 2, 2011 – 6:00 am

restoring the land-making machine

[The fluctuating terrain of the lower Mississippi River Delta, from the USGS’s map of “land area change in coastal Louisiana from 1932 to 2010”.  Loss is in red; accumulation is in green.  The map is seen via Free Association Design, where you can see the map in more detail, including the rapidly accreting area of […]

By rholmes | Posted in engineering, floods, infrastructure, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field | Also tagged , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
August 17, 2011 – 6:00 am

the atchafalaya basin project and the wax lake delta

[A map of the administrative units of the Atchafalaya Basin Project in 1982, produced by the Army Corps of Engineers.  The Atchafalaya Basin system is made up of three floodways: the Morganza Floodway (fed by the Morganza Spillway), the West Atchafalaya Floodway, and the Lower Atchafalaya Floodway; the latter is composed of the confluence of […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods | Also tagged , | Comments (3) | Permalink
June 6, 2011 – 6:00 am

cubit’s gap

[Cubit’s Gap, Louisiana] FASLANYC reports on the Mississippi as a “land-making machine”, vividly illustrated by the case of Cubit’s Gap: “…let’s consider the case of Cubit’s Gap, a major subdelta of the [Mississippi].  The gap formed in 1862 after an oyster fisherman (Cubit) and his daughters excavated a small ditch in the natural levee between […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, floods | Also tagged | Comments (1) | Permalink