Louisiana's Marshes Fight for Their Lives

[RedEarth]

November 15, 2005
Louisiana's Marshes Fight for Their Lives
By CORNELIA DEAN
Shea Penland nosed his truck along a mud-covered street, past uprooted trees, cars leaning crazily on fences, torn-off roofs, and piles of ruined furniture, wallboard and shingles - the waterlogged evidence that Hurricane Katrina had been through the New Orleans suburb of Chalmette.

Twice, he turned to avoid streets blocked by brick houses apparently torn from their slab foundations and dumped blocks away. Finally, he spotted what he was seeking. "Look at that," he said, pointing to what looked like misshaped bowling balls tufted with long strands of yellow grass, seemingly thrown onto the porch and through the gaping doorway of a wrecked brick ranch house. "Marshballs."

For Dr. Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, these clumps of black mud knitted with roots and fronds are an alarming sight. The marshballs, some as large as a sofa, others as small as a shoebox, had floated from wetlands to the east. Dr. Penland says they are more evidence that after decades of human interference, the marshes of Louisiana are in deep, deep trouble.

"A healthy marsh is pretty resilient," he said. "A stressed marsh - storms will physically break the marsh down." Now, as Louisiana struggles to recover from the storm, scientists like Dr. Penland are studying this marsh wreckage and the marshes themselves for clues to what ails them and how they might recover.

The questions are complicated, and the answers turn on a number of factors, including the region's geology, the ways people have engineered the flow of the Mississippi River, and the marsh-killing activities of the oil and gas industry. These issues inevitably lead to a far more difficult question: whether some marshlands, even inhabited marshlands, must be given up to the encroaching Gulf of Mexico.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/science/earth/15marsh.html?pagewanted=print