Is it because the US public has moved so far from the farm that they can no longer imagine how large an acreage an acre is?
Because I am having trouble imagining which acres are going where in any particular three quarters of an hour or whatever. Although there are some buildings in the pictures (big ones) that might be used for comparison.
One or two in the second picture might well supply images of acre sized warehousing for comparison.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=85519
I can't see why they just don't dig a channel through to Lake Pontchartrain and have a new port entirely. It would be the size of Portsmouth or Poole. Is it that military intelligence requires militants to think?
Whatever the case the salient facts have nothing to do with the salient:
"Left alone, nature would probably send the Lower Mississippi River whipping back and forth across a 200-mile arc every few thousand years."
"By the 1950s, it was clear to the Army Corps that the great river was beginning to shift, as the amount of water escaping from the Mississippi and flowing into the Atchafalaya River had increased from 10 percent in 1850 to 30 percent in 1950."
"Prior to major river engineering, the combined Mississippi-Atchafalaya River system transported an average of 400 million metric tons of sediment to coastal Louisiana each year. Today the average is more like 170 million tons, a 60 percent drop."
That last fact is the key. There is 400 metric tons/year spread over 200 miles/2000 years. That's just 160,000,000, tons of clay since Noah. Nobody knows what else is down there.
You can do what you like to the surface but given an unknown depth of silt lies over anyone's guess at the porosity of bedrock. Where the river goes is always going to be up to the river. And, so far, it would appear that I am the only fool daft enough to consider it worth mentioning.
"Ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, can not tame that lawless stream, can not curb it or confine it, can not say to it, Go here or Go there, and make it obey. —Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi".
It's been a while since I read that book (and if you are intending to learn any of the earth sciences, you should start with that one.) However, you should bear in mind that the guardians of the forests (man and beasts) ensured the carpet of trees was virginal until 400 years ago and still in good shape between the Mississippi and the Rockies for over half of the last 200.
