A new study says New Orleans is sinking into the Gulf. Here's a 300-year-old city's gloriously unbothered response to being told it's doomed.
A team of scientists at Tulane and Yale just published a paper in Nature concluding that New Orleans is, geologically speaking, doomed. The Gulf is coming. The shoreline could march as much as 60 miles inland. The local paper of record ran with it: the city may one day be an island, and then, eventually, not even that.
This stunned absolutely no one who has ever tried to park here during a light drizzle.
We know. We have always known. We built a 300-year-old city in a bowl below sea level, on purpose, surrounded by water on every side, in the most hurricane-prone corner of the continent, because the alternative was living somewhere with worse food. We did the math. We chose the gumbo. We regret nothing.
The headlines skipped the timeline. It is millennia. The authors write that "nobody alive today will see the end result." So if someone tells you to "visit New Orleans while you still can," what they technically mean is "visit sometime in the next several thousand years." Which, frankly, has always been our recommendation.
Understand who you're dealing with. New Orleans sends off its dead with a brass band and a parade, buries them above ground, and celebrates when they come back as ghosts and vampires. We have been told this city was a mistake since 1718. We are still here, and the kitchen is still open.
So: come visit while you still can. While the oysters are still cold and the trumpets are still warm and the ghosts still have dry land to haunt. The Gulf will get here eventually. It is in no particular hurry.
Neither are we.
Our ghosts have been here longer than the forecast, and they are not going anywhere. Come see them (and the gators) on the Gators, Ghosts & Vampires tour.
Leonard Crist
Co-Owner & Operations
Leonard Crist is the co-owner of Gators & Ghosts in the French Quarter. Born in Louisiana and raised up north, he has a degree in journalism and a law school dropout story that ended with him moving to New Orleans in 2013 to help his aunt Charlotte grow the business. He also works as a ghost tour guide and is trying to get on Jeopardy.
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