Saving a vital barrier

From the air, the Chandeleur islands -- a 50-mile-long nearly contiguous crescent of sand, topped in places with 18-foot dunes just a decade ago -- appear a tattered assemblage of sandy spits that poke out just a few feet from the Gulf of Mexico.

Neighboring barrier islands suffered a similar fate. What once was Curlew Island, a separate crescent between the Chandeleurs and Breton Island to the south, is a series of submerged, zigzagging sand bars. Only a sliver of nearby Grand Gosier Island has emerged from the water in the nearly two years since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

In a mere decade, ferocious hurricanes have splintered the land and washed much of it out to sea, destroying a vital barrier that once sapped power from the storms before they surged ashore on the mainland. Though the islands have been eroding for more than 1,000 years, scientists believed as recently as the 1980s that they would survive for centuries to come.

"When we made predictions on how long various barrier islands along our coast would last . . . we gave the Chandeleurs 300 years," said coastal geologist Shea Penland, director of the University of New Orleans' Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences, during a flight out to the islands two weeks ago.

Now, with that life span cut short, scientists and government officials have to figure out whether and how to rebuild the barrier islands, all part of the Breton National Wildlife Refuge, and at what cost.

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