A mammoth break in the Mississippi River’s banks far south of New Orleans is building substantial amounts of new land in a heavily eroded part of the coast, a new study finds, adding to the debate over whether and how it should be plugged.
The break, known as Neptune Pass, has grown so large it is comparable to the 10th-largest river in North America and the 100th-largest in the world, the new study by coastal scientist Alex Kolker and his collaborators finds.
That has posed hazards for shipping, but it is also acting as a natural river diversion, delivering sediment into a nearby bay in Breton Sound on the river’s east bank. For that reason, it has formed part of the debate over controversial efforts to build large-scale manmade river diversions under the state’s coastal restoration plans…