Alex Kolker is a coastal scientist with the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.
During the Covid-19 lockdown, while others baked sourdough bread, Alex was studying satellite images of the Mississippi River Delta. As an oceanographer, geologist, and climate scientist, he is interested in how the Louisiana coastline loses land, and also how it builds that land back.
As he examined the images, Alex noticed a channel connecting the Mississippi River to Breton Sound and Quarantine Bay. Over the course of about a year, he says, the tiny cut had widened into a veritable river. Neptune Pass, as it’s called, carried more than four times as much water as New York’s Hudson River.
That water contained sediment, which was building land. Alex started noticing islands forming in Quarantine Bay. This rapid land-building process was the opposite of what’s happening in much of Louisiana, which has lost 2,000 square miles in the past century.
After listening to Alex's interview, stay tuned for a bonus preview of our conversation with Prasanta Subudhi, a professor of plant genetics at Louisiana State University.
Prasanta grew up near India’s Bay of Bengal, in a village surrounded by rice fields. From a young age, the crop fascinated him. He considered careers in medicine and engineering, but rejected them both in favor of rice genetics.
Prasanta came to the United States to do research at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. In 2001 he joined the faculty at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Here, he’s been trying to answer a big question: How do we keep growing rice and feeding a hungry world even as the climate changes?
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