On the NewsHour this week, we will be covering how rising sea levels are threatening people who live on the fragile Louisiana Delta. Hari Sreenivasan spoke with Torbjörn Törnqvist, a coastal geoscientist at Tulane University who studies the evolution of low-lying coastal wetlands, about the dilemma in Louisiana.

Törnqvist said over the past 100 years, the sea level rise associated with climate change has crept up on the Gulf Coast. But rising oceans aren’t the only reason the Delta is disappearing. Man-made levees, diversions along the Mississippi River and oil drilling along the coast have contributed to rapid subsidence, sinking the marshlands without new silt to replace it. He said the problem has increased to a rate where the delta loses roughly a football field worth of land every half hour to an hour.

HARI SREENIVASAN: When it comes to sea level rise and subsidence, these are massive shifts that have been happening for quite some time. And is there a climate connection to it at all?

TORBJÖRN TÖRNQVIST: The thousand-year period prior to the industrial revolution, the rates of sea-level rise along the Gulf Coast, this larger area from the Florida Panhandle to East Texas, was about five times lower than it […]