A New Mississippi Pyramid Bubble Project

[farmerben]

 

https://soygrowers.com/dredging-the-mighty-mississippi-why-only-5-feet-measure-up/

The US government is already dredging the lower Mississippi in sufficient quantity to fill 2000 acres of polders every year.  From what I can see the mud being reclaimed gives us much less value than it could.  

 

My idea is bring firewood grade timber to the dredging polders.  Assemble crude wooden formworks above the water level and set them on fire enough to lightly char, but not fully burn them.  Then discharge the river material into the wooden formworks.  We allow mud to overflow the formworks permanently burying them.  Vehicles driving on top will compress the soil and fill in cavities.  

This will build mounds spaced out in the Mississippi delta.  The charred wood will absorb nitrates and phosphates, and lock them for a very long time.  The carbon will be immobilized for millennia.  The higher altitude mounds absorb the impact of hurricanes better.  There will still be plenty of wetland, but higher ground interspersed enriches biodiversity and human use.  

How does the engineering math work out?  That mostly depends on how much labor is required to collect the wood and get it to small ports anywhere on the river.  And how much labor goes into the form work for the mounds.  

It costs very little to carry 1000 tons of wood on a single barge down the river.   Say out standard mound site is 10 acres, and we work on about 100 mound sites at a time.  Then one barge worth of wood is enough to build up more than a foot around the perimeter on a site, with plenty extra to burn or bury randomly in the middle.  How much forest is that?  We can probably get 5 tons of scrap wood per acre consistent with sustainable thinning practices.  So 200 acres of forest thinned to load one barge one time.  Essentially we are feeding 20 acres worth of excess vegetative scrap per 1 acre of elevated reclaimed land.   Where the living matter continuously renews while the buried stuff is immobilized.  

There are a lot of questions still to consider of economic, social, and political importance.  I'm looking at it first and foremost in terms of the waste streams and externalities we currently generate, and looking for better places to put them.  

Like it or not, we live in an era when too many of the young people are under-employed and dependent on others.  You know what they do?  By day they ride around on ATV's looking for mud puddles and steep embankments tearing up as much forest as possible.  At night they set fires, take drugs, and yell at each other.  That's fine, it's a free country.  But could they please do something useful and not be so annoying.  

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 31, 2020 by farmerben

[Flying dutchman]

1 hour ago, farmerben said:

 

https://soygrowers.com/dredging-the-mighty-mississippi-why-only-5-feet-measure-up/

The US government is already dredging the lower Mississippi in sufficient quantity to fill 2000 acres of polders every year.  From what I can see the mud being reclaimed gives us much less value than it could.  

INPOLDEREN!