Oblique aerial photograph of a dune field in the Bonnet Carré Spillway. Sand deposits were worked into trains of dunes when flood water flowed in the spillway. Once the flood subsided and the spillway was closed, the water drained and dried from the spillway, thereby exposing the dunes. Trees and shrubs near the top of the photograph provide scale.??
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Researchers could have a new method to rebuild wetlands of the Louisiana delta, thanks to a chance finding while monitoring severe flooding of the Mississippi River. A team of civil engineers and geologists from the University of Illinois, in collaboration with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, published their findings Geoscience. In the spring and summer of 2011, high floodwaters on the Mississippi prompted the corps to open the Bonnet Carre spillway. The spillway had been built to divert water from urban New Orleans after flooding in 1927. The Illinois team saw in the spillway opening a chance to study how much sand flowed from the river into the spillway wetlands. "Whenever we have such natural disasters, it stresses the human system quite a bit," said Praveen Kumar , a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the U. of I. "But it also offers an opportune time to look at some scientific questions that we might otherwise not be able to explore." Armed with funds from the National Science Foundation, the researchers went to the spillway site to monitor the sand diverted from the river to the delta wetlands.
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