HoustonChronicle.com - Report says Louisiana's coastline is sinking; Texas' could be next. The Houston Chronicle covers this one pretty well. No doom and gloom and the world is ending because of man's environmental sins. The report says that there are two historical causes on the Texas Gulf coast. One is the previous use of groundwater wells which deplete the groundwater. They are going to surface water to alleviate this problem. The other is natural from the geological form of the underlying shale layer which allows compression by the tons of silt deposited from the rivers that flow into the Gulf. The second is something we can't fix.
The Gulf coast delta region was formed by the rivers' meandering over the coast and depositing silt over the area. We've channeled rivers like the Mississippi for a couple of hundred years and prevented this natural deposition. I wonder if that also affects the "lowering" since the top isn't being covered. Of course, that's a very long process and a couple of hundred years may not be enough to account for the subsidence.
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