The Mississippi Delta was built over 8000 years by deposition of sediment from the river’s vast upland basin. Freshwater and sediment periodically breached the river’s natural levees, creating and nourishing the marshes, swamps, and cheniers of South Louisiana. Approximately every thousand years the river switched channels, finding a quicker way to the Gulf of Mexico as a function of its own depositional patterns. This event is called an avulsion, wherein a new delta complex forms while the...