Why the Mississippi River Is Trying to Leave New Orleans

Why does the Mississippi River keep trying to switch to the Atchafalaya, and what stops it? The Army Corps of Engineers holds the river in place with 29 locks and dams, cutoffs that made it more than 150 miles shorter, and the Old River Control Structure, which keeps the Atchafalaya at about 30 percent of the flow. Levees also send the river's mud past Louisiana's marshes, which lost about 1,866 square miles from 1932 to 2016. Some details are visually simplified to aid understanding. Chapters: 0:00 Why the Mississippi River wants to leave New Orleans 1:05 Upper Mississippi locks and dams 1:51 New Madrid earthquakes and the levee problem 2:39 How the Army Corps straightened the Mississippi 3:39 Old River Control Structure and the 1973 flood 5:26 Louisiana land loss at the Mississippi River mouth Sources: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/rea... https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/onlin... https://corpslakes.erdc.dren.mil/empl... Archival photos and film: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. #MississippiRiver #ArmyCorpsOfEngineers #NewOrleans #Louisiana #Atchafalaya #CivilEngineering #RiverEngineering #Flood1927 Thumbnail: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers photo (public domain); map data: NASA Blue Marble, Mapzen Terrarium / USGS, Natural Earth. Visuals are AI-generated reconstructions based on the sources above.