(OilPrice) That Louisiana is sinking into the Gulf of Mexico is not news. Rising seas and coastline erosion have been working together for decades, but this sinking may well be happening faster than previously thought—threatening billions and billions of Louisiana oil infrastructure.
This is the central idea of a new study from Tulane University that set out to map the Louisiana coastline using new methods of measuring subsidence—the technical term for sinking land. The outcome of the measurements is an average 9 mm of wetlands lost to the sea every year. This compares to previous estimates of an annual subsidence rate between 1 to 6 mm.