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Mississippi rising

The Mississippi River is shackled by one of the world’s largest systems of flood control. A palaeohydrological record suggests that those measures might actually be making floods worse.
  1. Scott St. George

    1. Scott St. George is in the Department of Geography, Environment and Society, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA.

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The Mississippi River was once thought to be uncontrollable: no feat of engineering could prevent the river from bursting its banks and sending floodwaters across its natural domain. But since the late nineteenth century, an expanding system of levees, floodways and channel modifications (Fig. 1) has gradually brought the river to heel, largely confining its waters to the main channel and accelerating them downstream. In a paper in Nature, Munoz et al.1 conclude that those same control measures have inadvertently raised the threat of flooding in the lower Mississippi to a level that is unprecedented in the past five centuries.

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Nature 556, 34-35 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-03243-z

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