New Orleans is rich in geological history.
Authors Donnald McNabb & Louis E."Lee" Madère, Jr. open
A History of New Orleans with a discussion of the interrelationship of the Mississippi River and the local topography, which vexed early explorers as they sought to situate a city:
"[A]lthough New Orleans' situation is geographically magnificent, located at the mouth of the great Mississippi with its vast network of tributaries, the actual site is miserable, swampy land located in a dangerous, hostile environment, where the Mississippi debouches into the Gulf. The site's problems are numerous. The older and main parts of New Orleans rest on the natural levees of the Mississippi, about fifteen feet above sea level, with the firmest, most solid soil being silt. Most of the modern city is at or below sea level, with the Mississippi usually flowing past the city at a height of ten to fifteen feet above sea level, flooding at twenty feet. Behind the old city, between river and lack, until recently, was a backswamp, with no solid building foundations, which was a breeding ground for malaria until 1900. During heavy rains, the area filled up with water."
A cross section of the city shows what is so impossible about the site:
Most of the city is below sea level, swampy, and only accessible thanks to a mixture of natural and artificial levees. And yet gaining control of a city somewhere along the mouth of the Mississippi was an obvious early step in the imaginations of the leaders of this nascent country. Read McNabb & Madère's book cited above to learn why. BTW, scholar Pierce Lewis is credited with the quote that serves as the title of this blog post.
What other science should we explore leading up to and during the NSTA conference in New Orleans?
--Tyson Brown