Hurricane Laura Spiked Land Loss Rate Nearly 10-Fold In Its Path; Bonus - Bigger, Meaner Fire Ants
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One paper published in 2017 estimated that the Louisiana coast sinks at a rate of eight millimeters per year. Seas also are rising quickly around the delta, about 3 millimeters a year, compared to the 0.6 millimeters seen 600 years ago, when the delta was still growing. The combined effect of the sinking and the rising water is a rapidly disappearing coastline.
“The marsh edge erosion is a continuous process mainly induced by small wind waves,” says Louisiana State University Ph.D. student Yadav Sapkota. “These waves continuously tear at the marsh edge, causing the soil to collapse into the bay, eventually converting the entire marsh into open water.” But after large storms, that steady drumbeat of wetland loss speeds up. “After hurricanes, more chunks fall off,” says Sapkota’s adviser, Louisiana State University coastal scientist John White.
Two days after Hurricane Laura made landfall on August 27, White and Sapkota were surveying erosion in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay, where coastal islands of marsh grasses jut out of brackish water like islands of prairie grass. Even from a distance, White and Sapkota can see the effects of Hurricane Laura’s intense winds in the flattened grass, normally upright. After visiting sites once staked at a marsh's edge and measuring how far the grass has receded, Sapkota concludes that the storm sped up erosion rates in the region by 63 percent compared to long-term rates. In the four years the researchers have been sampling, the marshes have been diminished by an average of 0.4 centimeter every day. During the storm, those same marshes lost 35 cm a day.
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Hooper-Bùi predicts that parts of the state that saw the worst storm surge will experience the same thing New Orleans saw after Hurricane Katrina in 2005: Invasive ants gained a foothold. After Katrina, Hooper-Bùi says, lingering floodwaters killed native species in the New Orleans area. Fire ants quickly moved in, and Hooper-Bui says she noticed what appeared to be more aggressive ant behavior: People who evacuated during the storm often had what looked like full body rashes, in which each large pustule was a single ant bite. In April, Hooper-Bùi published a study documenting that phenomenon and showing that rising seas are making invasive fire ants bigger and more aggressive. Ants that might normally crawl over your foot when passing by, she says, might instead bite it—repeatedly. The behavioral trait, she thinks, stems from their sudden lack of food.
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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/09/how-hurricane-laura-hastens-louisiana-wetland-loss/#close
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