Mississippi River Delta

The Mississippi River Delta is the region in southeastern Louisiana where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico, stretching from Vermilion Bay in the west to the Chandeleur Islands in the east across roughly 12,000 square kilometers, the seventh-largest river delta in the world. It contains more than 2.7 million acres of coastal wetlands, accounting for about 37 percent of all estuarine marsh in the continental United States, and drains a basin covering roughly 41 percent of the contiguous United States, discharging an average of about 470,000 cubic feet of water per second into the Gulf. As a river-dominated delta built by the largest river system in North America, it plays an outsized role in the continent's wetland ecology and coastal geography.