Mississippi River Delta in the context of "Mississippi River Valley"

The Mississippi River is the primary river of the largest drainage basin in the United States. It is the second-longest river in the United States, behind only the Missouri. From its traditional source of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, it flows generally south for 2,340 mi (3,770 km) to the Mississippi River Delta in the Gulf of Mexico. With its many tributaries, the Mississippi's watershed drains all or parts of 32 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces between the Rocky and Appalachian mountains. The river either borders or passes through the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The main stem is entirely within the United States; the total drainage basin is 1,151,000 sq mi (2,980,000 km), of which only about one percent is in Canada. The Mississippi ranks as the world's tenth-largest river by discharge flow, and the largest in North America.

Native Americans have lived along the Mississippi River and its tributaries for thousands of years. Many were hunter-gatherers, but some, such as the Mound Builders, formed prolific agricultural and urban civilizations, and some practiced aquaculture. The arrival of Europeans in the 16th century changed the native way of life as first explorers, then settlers, ventured into the basin in increasing numbers. The river served sometimes as a barrier, forming borders for New Spain, New France, and the early United States, and throughout as a vital transportation artery and communications link. In the 19th century, during the height of the ideology of manifest destiny, the Mississippi and several tributaries, most notably its largest, the Ohio and Missouri, formed pathways for the western expansion of the United States. The river also became the subject of American literature, particularly in the writings of Mark Twain.

Baton Rouge (/ˌbætən ˈruːʒ/ BAT-ən ROOZH; French: Bâton-Rouge, pronounced [bɑtɔ̃ ʁuʒ] ) is the capital city of the U.S. state of Louisiana. It had a population of 227,470 at the 2020 United States census, making it Louisiana's second-most populous city. It is the seat of Louisiana's most populous parish, East Baton Rouge Parish, and the center of Louisiana's second-largest metropolitan area, Greater Baton Rouge, which had 870,569 residents in 2020.

Located on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, the Baton Rouge area owes its historical importance to its strategic site upon the Istrouma Bluff, the first natural bluff upriver from the Mississippi River Delta at the Gulf of Mexico. This allowed the development of a business quarter safe from seasonal flooding. In addition, it built a levee system stretching from the bluff southward to protect the riverfront and low-lying agricultural areas.

In usage in the Southern United States, a bayou (/ˈbaɪ.uː, ˈbaɪ.oʊ/ ) is a body of water typically found in a flat, low-lying area. It may refer to an extremely slow-moving stream, river (often with a poorly defined shoreline), marshy lake, wetland, or creek. They typically contain brackish water highly conducive to fish life and plankton. Bayous are commonly found in the Gulf Coast region of the southern United States, especially in the Mississippi River Delta, though they also exist elsewhere.

A bayou is often an anabranch or minor braid of a braided channel that is slower than the mainstem, usually becoming boggy and stagnant. Though fauna varies by region, many bayous are home to crawfish, certain species of shrimp, other shellfish, and leeches, catfish, frogs, toads, salamanders, newts, American alligators, turtles, and snakes such as watersnakes, swampsnakes, mudsnakes, crayfish snakes, and cottonmouths. Common birds include anhingas, egrets, herons, spoonbills, as well as many other species.

Hurricane Nate was a deadly, fast moving and destructive tropical cyclone which was the costliest natural disaster in Costa Rican history. An unusually fast-moving tropical cyclone, it caused severe flooding in Central America, leading to widespread destruction and casualties, during early October 2017, before making landfall on the US Gulf Coast. The fourteenth named storm and ninth hurricane of the extremely active 2017 Atlantic hurricane season, Nate originated from a broad area of low pressure over the southwestern Caribbean on October 3. The disturbance moved northwest, organizing into a tropical depression the next day and attaining tropical storm intensity early on October 5. The storm made landfall in Nicaragua that same day and continued into Honduras with little change in strength. Nate began steady intensification over the warm waters of the northwestern Caribbean Sea shortly thereafter. It attained hurricane strength while moving through the Yucatán Channel early on October 7, attaining peak winds of 90 mph (150 km/h) in the central Gulf of Mexico later that day. Early on the next day, Nate made landfall near the mouth of the Mississippi River in Louisiana. After crossing the marshland of the Mississippi Delta, it made its second U.S. landfall near Biloxi, Mississippi early on October 8, causing a storm surge to flood the ground floors of coastal casinos and buildings, as well as causing rip currents, hurricane-force winds, and beach erosion.

Moving northwestward at 29 mph (47 km/h), Nate was the fastest-moving tropical system ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico. It is also the fourth Atlantic hurricane of 2017 to have made landfall in the United States or one of its territories; such a quartet of landfalls has not occurred since 2005. In addition, Nate was the first tropical cyclone to move ashore in the state of Mississippi since Hurricane Katrina.

A deltaic lobe is a wetland formation that forms as a river empties water and sediment into other bodies of water. As the sediment builds up from this delta, the river will break away from its single channel and the mouth will be pushed outwards, forming a deltaic lobe.

When the rate of water discharge and lobe progradation are sufficiently high, a river can form a deltaic lobe. A single deltaic lobe includes a network of shallow channels called distributaries that make up a distributary network that branches off from the mainstream of the river. These networks can be the blueprint for a future progradational deltaic lobe when the initial deltaic lobe is abandoned. As the deltaic lobe progresses, heavier and coarser sediments settle first. As heavier sediments are deposited at the top of the deltaic lobe, smaller and finer sediments get deposited out, creating the beginning of a deltaic fan. When the alluvium, the smallest sediment carried by the deltaic lobe, is deposited and new land is formed, the resulting formation is considered a delta.