A call for new attention to restoring sedimentology of river deltas

Indiana University News Room: Rapid advances in the new and developing field of restoration sedimentology will be needed to protect the world's river deltas from an array of threats, Indiana University Bloomington geologist Douglas A. Edmonds writes in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The commentary, published this week in the November issue, addresses the fact that land is disappearing from river deltas at alarming rates. And deltas are extraordinarily important: They are ecologically rich and productive, and they are home to about 10 percent of the world's population. "There's a lot of talk about ecological restoration of the coast," Edmonds said. "But with delta environments, before ecological restoration can happen you have to stabilize the coastline."

Under naturally occurring processes, coastal land is both created and destroyed at river deltas. River sediment is deposited at the delta, building land. Erosion takes some of the land away. The rate of land growth or loss depends on the balance between "sources" and "sinks," which is influenced by the complex interaction of floods, ocean waves and tides, vegetative decay and wind.

But sea-level rise and coastal subsidence have tilted the scales toward land loss, and dams and levees built for flood control have interfered with the delivery of sediment. In the Mississippi River delta, the chief focus of the article, an expanse of land the size of a football field disappears every hour....

A floating house in the Mekong Delta, shot by Étienne André, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license