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 Mississippi River Delta is a river-dominated delta system, influenced by the largest river system in North America. The shape of the current birdfoot delta reflects the dominance the river exerts over the other hydrologic and geologic processes at play in the northern Gulf of Mexico.
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.
The Ganges-Brahmaputra delta is the world's largest delta, covering most of Bangladesh and the state of West Bengal (India). The size of the delta is a reflection of the enormous input of sediment being washed off the still-growing Himalayan mountains into the Ganges river basin.
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.
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.
Overall, the delta plain grew to more than 600,000 square miles. That is more than 10 times the size of the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta, the largest in the world today, and it dwarfs the Nile River Delta's measly 9,650 square miles. We're talking about a river delta nearly the size of the entire state of Alaska.
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.
1925: Huff Daland Dusters, the predecessor of Delta, is founded in Macon, Ga., before moving to Monroe, La., a few months later. This was the first commercial agricultural flying company, and Huff Daland's 18 planes become the largest privately owned fleet in the world.
Ganges River Delta. The Ganges River and its surrounding watershed supports one of the most fertile and densely populated regions on the planet, and its intricate web of waterways offered a stunning view to the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia on mission STS-87.