As the course of the Mississippi River changed over the last 6,000 years, sedimentary deposits resulted in a series of 16 distinct river deltas, also called deltaic lobes.
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The Ganges Brahmaputra Delta, also named Ganges Delta, Sunderban Delta or Bengal Delta is situated in Asia where the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers discharge into the Bay of Bengal. It is, with a surface area of some 100.000 km2, the world's largest Delta.
The Mississippi Delta, also known as the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta, or simply the Delta, is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi (and portions of Arkansas and Louisiana) that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers.
The shifting river delta at the mouth of the Mississippi on the Gulf Coast lies some 300 miles south of this area, and is referred to as the Mississippi River Delta. Rather, the Mississippi Delta is part of an alluvial plain, created by regular flooding of the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers over thousands of years.
Where the Mobile, Spanish, Tensaw, Apalachee and Blakeley rivers flow into Mobile Bay stands an incredible facility for outdoor recreation, conservation and land stewardship in Alabama: 5 Rivers Delta Resource Center.
A delta is a wetland area that forms as river waters empty into a larger body of water. Often, deltas look triangular in shape and sometimes they're even described as looking like a fan.
One big difference between the two is that while the Nile delta is shrinking (the Mediterranean Sea is eating away more sediment than the river can supply), the Mississippi delta is growing. The image below shows the growth of the Mississippi delta over the past 10,000 years.
On average, the Mississippi River Delta loses one football field of land per hour and has shrunk by 5,000 square miles in the last 80 years. To understand more about why some parts of the delta are disappearing due to sea-level rise, a team of NASA scientists will begin collecting data this spring.
The Amazon River Estuary Bioregion, located in the Southern America (Neotropical) realm, includes a huge river delta formed at the end of the Amazon River's 4000-mile journey to the sea in northern Brazil, where it meets up with the Tocantins River, encompassing the Marajó Archipelago.
The Mississippi River Delta is the 7th largest river delta on Earth (USGS) and is an important coastal region for the United States, containing more than 2.7 million acres (4,200 sq mi; 11,000 km2) of coastal wetlands and 37% of the estuarine marsh in the conterminous U.S. The coastal area is the nation's largest ...