Happy New Year! 2008 brings your dedicated Crew back to the streets of “NOLA” for ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL, Spring Semester: THE BUILD! I don’t know about y’all, but we’re ready to put on some serious hard hats.

While purple-clad, victorious, and hungover LSU (Louisiana State University) football fans stumbled home Monday morning after a winning championship game, Tulane URBANbuild students were already hard at work on the corner of Seventh and Dryades. And as usual, we were there, filming it all.

Build Day #1, which apparently involves a significant amount of orange spray paint. They use it to mark foundation and elevation measurements – now based, not surprisingly, on new post-Katrina city regulations.

The Crew is staging in an empty NHS house up for sale, a block away from the site. We’re all on walkie-talkies, so we’re in constant communication. But walkies don’t alleviate having to run up and down the block to deliver fresh P2 cards and batteries, ask on-camera people to sign releases, or watch scenes to log notes. We assigned the crew and the students each a secret walkie code name. I said “secret” – so don’t ask…

It was a fun day, as per Casey who said, without a hint of sarcasm: “It’s better than Disneyworld.” We’ll see how long that lasts. First up – organize the toolbox!

Rachel Clift
Producer

WASHINGTON, DC, July 15, 2008 (ENS) – This year’s dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is likely to be the largest on record and growing U.S. corn production is a primary cause of the worsening conditions, federal and state scientists said Tuesday.

The research team predicts that the dead zone – a stretch of water without enough oxygen to support marine life – could cover some 8,800 square miles this summer, an area roughly the size of the state of New Jersey.

The forecast was announced today by scientists with the U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and Louisiana State University, LSU, who predicted the dead zone would be the largest since official monitoring began in 1985.

The dead zone forms annually off the coasts of Louisiana and Texas, fed by nutrient heavy water from the Mississippi River.

The country’s largest river drains some 40 percent of the United States, including much of its agricultural heartland and its corn belt.

From as far north as Minnesota, runoff water laden with fertilizer nutrients nitrogen and phosphorous flows into river and into the Gulf, stimulating an overgrowth of algae. When the algae die, they sink to the bottom and decompose, depleting oxygen levels in the water and choking out marine life.

Fertilizers spread on an Iowa cornfield
are washed hundreds of miles
south to the Gulf of Mexico.
(Photo by Bret McVey)

“The strong link between nutrients and the dead zone indicates that excess nutrients from the Mississippi River watershed during the spring are the primary human-influenced factor behind the expansion of the dead zone,” said Rob Magnien, director of the NOAA Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research.

Last year’s dead zone reached some 7,900 square miles, but the record came in 2002, when the area totalled nearly 8,500 square miles.

Record corn harvests throughout the Midwest are clearly adding to the problem, according to Eugene Turner, a scientist with LSU, and leader of the research team.

U.S. farmers are planting “an awful lot of corn and soybeans,” he told reporters, adding that both crops leach nitrogen easily into soil and groundwater.

Corn production in the United States has shot up dramatically in recent years, driven by demand for corn-based ethanol. The U.S. Agriculture Department estimates some 87 million acres of corn were planted this year.

“The nitrogen is undoubtedly coming down in larger amounts because there’s more planting of corn this year than there has been in a very long time,” Turner said.

Some 817,000 tons of nitrogen, roughly 35-45 percent above normal, seeped into the Gulf between April and June, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, USGS.

Added to the mix is a record amount of phosphorous flowing into the Gulf.

The USGS reported that 85,000 tons of phosphorous entered the Gulf from April through June, some 85 percent above normal levels.

Turner said his team is uncertain what impact last month’s record floods in the Midwest will have on the dead zone.

Although researchers can’t quantify the effects yet, he added, it is likely that the zone will expand from as a large pulse of floodwater coming down the Mississippi enters the Gulf.

Mississippi River plume meets Gulf of
Mexico water at Southwest Pass,
a primary shipping channel in
Louisiana waters. (Photo by N.
Rabelais courtesy USGS)

“We just don’t quite know yet what the full effect will be,” Turner said.

Crews are heading out into the Gulf on Sunday to begin this year’s official dead zone measuring.

“We expect a final [figure] to be available about a week or two from now,” Magnien told reporters on a press telebriefing.

Turner warned that the economic impact of the dead zone would again ripple through the Gulf’s lucrative commercial and recreational fishing industries.

“The fish and shrimp have left this area and it is inconceivable that you could have that much change on the bottom and not change the fisheries in some way,” Turner said. “This area is about 25-30 percent of U.S. fisheries – it is a pretty big fishery that is under threat.”

Changing conditions to prevent the annual dead zone won’t be easy, he added. “It is not just a matter of turning the switch today.”

“It is going to have to come from changes in land use,” Turner said. “We will have to reduce the amount of nitrogen coming off the watershed.”

He suggested farmers move away from perennial crops that leave the land barren and susceptible to flooding, but warned that reductions in nutrient runoff will not yield instant results. Nitrogen is stored in the soil and can continue leaching for many years.

The report comes as some 250 corn growers from more than 20 states are convening in Washington, DC this week for the biannual Corn Congress meeting of the National Corn Growers Association.

Ron Litterer, NCGA president and a grower from Iowa, said, “We especially find it important to set aside time for farmers to meet with their representatives and senators and tell them what’s important for growers back home.”

In February, NCGA corn growers, conservation organizations and companies throughout the agriculture supply chain teamed up to launch a first-of-its-kind working group to help establish sustainable outcomes for agriculture.

The group’s initial focus will be creating a sustainability index to analyze and report use of land, water, energy, greenhouse gas emissions and crop production inputs in four key commodity crops � corn, cotton, soybeans and wheat.

For World Wildlife Fund, Jason Clay said at the launch, “Continued improvements in efficient land use will be critical if we’re going to meet the ever-growing demand for food and fiber without putting more pressure on our environmental resources.”

By J.R. Pegg

View This Story On Eco–mmunity Map.

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana, February 10, 2008 (ENS) – Sediments deposited into the Mississippi River Delta thousands of years ago when North America’s glaciers retreated are contributing to the ongoing sinking of Louisiana’s coastline, finds new research by NASA and scientists at Louisiana State University.

The weight of these sediments is causing a large section of Earth’s crust to sag at a rate of 0.04 to 0.3 inches a year, the study determined.

The sediments pose a particular challenge for New Orleans, causing it to sink irreversibly at a rate of about 0.17 inches a year, according to data from a network of global positioning system stations and a model of sediment data collected from the northern Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi Delta.

“When the effect of this sinking near New Orleans is combined with a potential 0.9 centimeter (0.35 inch) annual sea level rise that could result should ice sheet melting accelerate as projected by many climate models, it is possible New Orleans could see a relative sea level rise of roughly one meter (3.3 feet) in the next 90 years,” warned co-author Ron Blom of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 focused national attention on the Gulf coast’s vulnerability to hurricanes due to loss of wetlands and sea level rise. These new findings add another factor for scientists, government agencies and the public to consider when assessing the vulnerability of the region to hurricanes and large storms.

A science team led by Erik Ivins of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, hypothesized that Earth’s very slow gravitational flow response to the weight of the sediments, combined with a 427 foot rise in sea level that took place thousands of years ago, are contributing to the sinking of a 77,000 square mile section of coastal Louisiana.

To test their theory, the team developed a physical model of sinking caused by both the weight of the sea level rise and the flow of glacial sediments into the Gulf of Mexico following the retreat of the great ice sheet that covered much of North America some 22,000 years ago.

The model spanned the past 750,000 years.

Results were compared with actual global positioning system measurements and other geophysical data for southern Louisiana and the Gulf, collected from multiple sources over the past 60 years. The scientists found the model results were in good agreement with the actual geophysical data.

Looking north up the Atchafalaya River Delta
where the Louisiana coast is slowly sinking
(Photo courtesy U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers)

The greatest sinking rates were observed where coastal land loss is greatest, near the center of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya River Delta complexes.

“Our study shows that the weight of these sediments on Earth’s crust can explain between 0.1 and 0.8 centimeters (0.04 and 0.3 inches) of sinking per year,” said study co-author Roy Dokka, director of the Louisiana State Center for Geoinformatics.

“These sediments contribute a part of the region’s sinking that’s inevitable and must be considered when predicting rates of sinking and future sea level change in coastal Louisiana,” he said.

The scientists say when these results are combined with sinking totaling about 0.3 centimeters (0.12 inches) per year caused by other factors such as compaction and oxidation of sediments, pumping of oil and water by humans, faulting and sea level rise, the overall outlook is not bright.

“Louisiana is slowly losing its battle with the Gulf of Mexico,” said Ivins. “Our model predicts this rate of sinking will continue for hundreds of years. Continued sinking, along with the sediment starvation of the coast caused by construction of flood control levees along the Mississippi River, will ultimately lead to the drowning of the coast.”

The good news, the authors say, is that, with refinement, their model may help the region prepare better for future large storms and the gradual inundation of the coast.

“Our model gives civil engineers and disaster preparedness managers very precise predictions of how the landscape is changing so that they can better mitigate the effects of this sinking,” said Ivins. “Understanding all of the processes affecting the coast is essential for engineering effective solutions.”

The authors say the relative fluidity of Earth’s upper mantle beneath the Gulf coast is the primary factor that determines how Earth’s crust responds to deposited sediments.

Earth’s crust and uppermost mantle is weaker beneath the Gulf of Mexico than it is beneath eastern Canada.

Results of the study are published in “Geophysical Research Letters.” The research was funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Louisiana Board of Regents.

View This Story On Eco-mmunity Map.