Mississippi River Basin Model

en.wikipedia.org

57 points·fredley··12 comments

The 99% Invisible podcast episode, "America's Last Top Model", is an excellent history of the project.[0]

[0] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/americas-last-top-mod...

John McPhee's "Control of Nature"[0] covers a fair amount of the Mississippi River Basin Model's use and provides a lot of insight into the history of controlling waterways.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Control-Nature-John-McPhee/dp/0374522...

This book is a compendium of two or three long articles that appeared in the New Yorker in the late 80s. You can find it there as well.

There's a huge model of the SF Bay that you can visit for free!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Corps_of_Engineers...

It's mentioned in the linked article for size comparison. 1.5 acres compared to 200 for the Mississippi one (!)

Bah, I missed it. That's incredibly large!

My neighbor's grandfather worked on this and she drunkenly told me about it last weekend. I don't have anything else to add.

Mud Island in Memphis (located in the Mississippi river) has a 2000 foot long model of the lower Mississippi river that is neat to walk along: http://www.mudisland.com/c-14-riverwalk.aspx

Reminiscent of the Huangyangtan model:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aksai_Chin#Chinese_terrain_mod...

And getting on for Borgesian proportions:

https://genius.com/Jorge-luis-borges-on-exactitude-in-scienc...

Apropos of this system - the Old River Control Structure has been depositing unaccounted for sediments that threaten to upset the diversion above Morgan City - https://biggerpieforum.org/environment/tip-of-a-mudberg/

Reminds me of this Tom Scott video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i70wkxmumAw

Atlas Obscura video here

https://youtu.be/WeTcYcd5dUM

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