Climate Change? Nahhh ...

At the St. Anthony Falls in Minneapolis, the Mississippi is about 500 feet across.
At the DeSoto Bridge in Memphis, it's about 3,500 feet across.

 

Yeah, when it comes to flooding the Mississippi is basically two different rivers — everything above St. Louis, and everything below. Most of the forecasts for the lower Mississippi seem fine.
And it's funny, too, that six months ago people were freaking out about the Mississippi River going dry because of a low season that was lower than normal. The thing just ebbs and flows. It floods in the spring and gets low in the summer. It's done it that way for centuries.

 

Sort of.

The Army Corps of Engineers has made lots of interventions since this happened:

Mississippi River flood of 1927 | Description & Facts

Better? Worse? The same?

Who knows.

 

The Corps' work mostly ensures that the floods aren't the epic disasters they used to be. The river still floods and goes low every year, sometimes to extreme levels. The 2011 Lower Mississippi flood was worse than the 1927 flood, and might have been even worse than that if not for the efforts of the Corps.

And if the Corps wasn't doing what it does, the middle of the country would look a lot different. Most notably, the Mississippi River would, in fairly short order, cease to flow past Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-m...aint-degas-little-dancer-national-gallery-dc/

Protesters smeared black and red paint on the case and pedestal of Edgar Degas’s “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” sculpture in the National Gallery of Art in D.C. on Thursday to bring attention to the climate crisis and demand that President Biden declare a climate emergency.

 

Jeez ... could that twerp with the black paint look any more stereotypically insufferable?

 

When I first toured around Vicksburg, I was struck by how going from the river to the town didn't seem all that tough. "Why was Vicksburg such a daunting place to attack?" Then I found out that in 1876 the river had made this sudden shift, bypassing that turn just north of the bluffs that had brought river traffic alongside the bluffs (and therefore vulnerable to devastating artillery fire).

 

The amazing thing is that the shift happened in one day. It had been cutting through for a while, and the land finally gave way one afternoon — coincidentally, on April 26 — and then quickly settled into its current course.
The old course of the river still exists, though. Throughout the late 1800s, the Corps and the city's leaders worked to connect the new course of the Mississippi to the Yazoo River, and in 1903 they opened the Yazoo Diversion Canal that connects the two. So if you go to tour Vicksburg and see what appears to be the river flowing past downtown, that's actually the canal that used to be the Mississippi River.
There is also a little isolated spit of land in the canal, a few hundred feet from downtown, called DeSoto Island. Before April 26, 1876 it was DeSoto Point. That's the patch of land that the river cut through. It's also part of Louisiana.

https://www.vicksburgpost.com/2022/...ksburg-lost-the-river-they-built-another-one/

 

Those oxbows have caused states from either side of the river to have land on the opposite side. There was talk a while ago of building a casino on the Arkansas side of the river on one of those oxbows on Mississippi land, where casino gambling is legal. (Arkansas has since legalized casinos.)

 

I've always wondered why the river states don't all get together and clean up the map. Figure out which state should have which bits and pieces based on the modern location of the river, make some compromises if need be, and do some land swaps to get everything in the right hands. There's got to be a bunch of jurisdictional headaches with not only law enforcement, but fish and wildlife agencies. Hunters who think they're in Mississippi, for example, but are actually in Louisiana or Arkansas and inadvertently violating a state law.
Maybe the river moves so much that it's not prudent. Or it's more trouble than it's worth. Like maybe it's hard-wired into the archaic language of state charters and constitutions on where the boundaries are and will forever be. Delaware and New Jersey have an issue like that, where Delaware's border extends all the way to the low tide line in New Jersey. It's resulted in several Supreme Court cases over the years.

 

Because Virginia was the big swinging dick in 18th century America before being split up, the state of Ohio technically owns none of the Ohio River.

 

Ellis Park is across the river in Evansville, but it’s still part of Kentucky.