In Celebration of Mardi Gras in Louisiana, we will continue our visit to the Crescent City. I found facts and maps at Wikipedia, which is a sharing site with no copyright infringements! Over at Google You Tube, I located some cool vids to give us a look at the French Quarter. Thanks to all of You for the plus ones and the visit to the mini Nature Class. We have a wonderful opportunity to learn of the whole world here on Google Earth! So enjoy and You have a surprise music vid at the end of the great music that born in New Orleans!
Louisiana
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana
Louisiana (
i/luːˌiːziˈænə/ or i/ˌluːziˈænə/; French: État de Louisiane, [lwizjan] (
listen);Louisiana Creole: Léta de la Lwizyàn) is a state located in the southern region of the United States of America. Louisiana is the 31st most extensive and the 25th most populous of the 50 United States. Its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans. Louisiana is the only state in the U.S. with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are local governmentsequivalent to counties. The largest parish by population is East Baton Rouge Parish, and the largest by land area is Cameron Parish.
i/luːˌiːziˈænə/ or i/ˌluːziˈænə/; French: État de Louisiane, [lwizjan] ( listen);Louisiana Creole: Léta de la Lwizyàn) is a state located in the southern region of the United States of America. Louisiana is the 31st most extensive and the 25th most populous of the 50 United States. Its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans. Louisiana is the only state in the U.S. with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are local governmentsequivalent to counties. The largest parish by population is East Baton Rouge Parish, and the largest by land area is Cameron Parish.
Much of the state was formed from sediment washed down the Mississippi River, leaving enormous deltas and vast areas of coastal marsh and swamp.[7] These contain a rich southern biota; typical examples include birds such as ibis and egrets. There are also many species of tree frogs, and fish such as sturgeon and paddlefish. In more elevated areas, fire is a natural process in the landscape, and has produced extensive areas of longleaf pine forest and wet savannas. These support an exceptionally large number of plant species including many species of orchids and carnivorous plants
| State of Louisiana
État de Louisiane
| |||||
| |||||
| Nickname(s): Bayou State • Child of the Mississippi Creole State • Pelican State (official) Sportsman's Paradise • Sugar State | |||||
| Motto(s): Union, Justice and Confidence Union, justice, et confiance (French) Lunyon, Jistis, é Konfyans (Louisiana Creole) | |||||
 | |||||
| Official language(s) | None English (de facto) French (de facto) | ||||
| Demonym | Louisianan, Louisianais (French) Lwizyané(èz) (Creole) | ||||
| Capital | Baton Rouge | ||||
| Largest city | New Orleans[1][2][3] | ||||
| Largest metro area | Greater New Orleans | ||||
| Area | Ranked 31st in the U.S. | ||||
| - Total | 51,843 sq mi (135,382 km2) | ||||
| - Width | 130 miles (210 km) | ||||
| - Length | 379 miles (610 km) | ||||
| - % water | 15 | ||||
| - Latitude | 28° 56′ N to 33° 01′ N | ||||
| - Longitude | 88° 49′ W to 94° 03′ W | ||||
| Population | Ranked 25th in the U.S. | ||||
| - Total | 4,601,893 (2012 est)[4] | ||||
| - Density | 105/sq mi (40.5/km2) Ranked 24th in the U.S. | ||||
| Elevation | |||||
| - Highest point | Driskill Mountain[5][6] 535 ft (163 m) | ||||
| - Mean | 100 ft (30 m) | ||||
| - Lowest point | New Orleans[5][6] -8 ft (-2.5 m) | ||||
| Before statehood | Territory of Orleans | ||||
| Admission to Union | April 30, 1812 (18th) | ||||
| Governor | Bobby Jindal (R) | ||||
| Lieutenant Governor | Jay Dardenne (R) | ||||
| Legislature | State Legislature | ||||
| - Upper house | State Senate | ||||
| - Lower house | House of Representatives | ||||
| U.S. Senators | Mary Landrieu (D) David Vitter (R) | ||||
| U.S. House delegation | 6 Republicans, 1 Democrat (list) | ||||
| Time zone | Central: UTC-6/-5 | ||||
| Abbreviations | LA US-LA | ||||
| Website | louisiana.gov | ||||
Geology
Even the Gulf of Mexico did not exist 250 million years ago when there was but one supercontinent, Pangea. As Pangea split apart, the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico opened. Louisiana was then slowly built, over millions of years, from water into land, and from north to south.[7] The oldest rocks are exposed in the north, in areas like the Kisatchie National Forest. The oldest rocks date back only to the early Tertiary Era, some 60 million years ago. The history of the formation of these rocks can be found in Spearing's Geological History of Lousiana.[9]
The youngest parts of the state were formed over the last 7,500 years as deltas of the Mississippi River: The Maringouin, Teche, St. Bernard, Lafourche, the modern Mississippi, and now the Atchafalaya.[10] The sediments were carried from north to south by the Mississippi River.
In between the Tertiary rocks of the north, and the relatively new sediments along the coast, is a vast belt known as the Pleistocene Terraces. Their age and distribution can be largely related to the rise and fall of sea levels during past ice ages. In general, the northern terraces have had sufficient time for rivers to cut deep channels, while the newer terraces tend to be much flatter.[11]
Salt domes are also found in Louisiana. Their origin can be traced back to the early Gulf of Mexico, when the shallow ocean had high rates of evaporation. There are several hundred salt domes in the state; one of the most familiar is Avery Island.[12] Salt domes are important not only as a source of salt; they also serve as underground traps for oil and gas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parishes_in_Louisiana
The U.S. state of Louisiana is divided into 64 parishes in the same way that 48 of the other states of the United States are divided into counties. Alaska is the other exception, which is divided into boroughs and census areas instead.
Forty-one parishes are governed by a council called the Police Jury. The other 23 have various other forms of government, including: president-council, council-manager, parish commission, and consolidated parish/city.
Protected areas
Owing to its location, and geology, the state has high biological diversity. Some vital areas, such as southwestern prairie, have experienced a loss in excess of 98 percent. The pine flatwoods of the Florida parishes are also at great risk, mostly from fire suppression and urban sprawl.[7]There is not yet a properly organized system of natural areas to represent and protect Louisiana's biological diversity. Such as system would consist of a protected system of core areas linked by biological corridors, such as Florida is planning.[25]
None-the-less, Louisiana contains a number of areas which are, in varying degrees, protected from human intervention.[26] In addition to National Park Service sites and areas and a United States National Forest, Louisiana operates a system of state parks, state historic sites, one state preservation area, one state forest, and many Wildlife Management Areas. The Nature Conservancy also owns and manages a set of natural areas. One of Louisiana's largest natural areas is Kisatchie National Forest. It is some 600,000 acres in area, more than half of which is vitalflatwoods vegetation, which supports many rare plant and animal species.[7] These include the Louisiana pine snake and Red-cockaded woodpecker. The system of protected cypress swamps around Lake Pontchartrain provides another large and important natural area, with southern wetland species including egrets, alligators, and sturgeon. At least 12 core areas would be needed to build a protected areas system for the state; these would range from southwestern prairies, to the Pearl River Floodplain in the east, to the Mississippi River alluvial swamps in the north.[7]
The Louisiana Natural and Scenic Rivers System provides a degree of protection for 48 rivers, streams and bayous in the state. It is administered by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
[edit]National Park Service
Historic or scenic areas managed, protected, or otherwise recognized by the National Park Service include:
- Cane River National Heritage Area near Natchitoches;
- Cane River Creole National Historical Park near Natchitoches;
- Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve, headquartered in New Orleans, with units in St. Bernard Parish, Barataria (Crown Point), and Acadiana (Lafayette);
- Poverty Point National Monument at Epps, Louisiana; and
- Saline Bayou, a designated National Wild and Scenic River near Winn Parish in northern Louisiana.
[edit]US Forest Service
- Kisatchie National Forest is Louisiana's only national forest. It includes 600,000 acres in central and north Louisiana with large areas of flatwoods and longleaf pine forest.
[edit]State parks and recreational areas
Louisiana operates a system of 22 state parks, 17 state historic sites and one state preservation area.
[edit]Transportation
In March 2011, Louisiana ranked as the second bottom "Worst" state (next to number 50 Kentucky), in the American State Litter Scorecard. The Pelican State suffers from an overall poor effectiveness and quality of its statewide public space cleanliness (primarily from roadway and adjacent litter/debris)--in state and related eradication standards.[27]
The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development is the state government organization in charge of maintaining public transportation, roadways, bridges, canals, select levees, floodplain management, port facilities, commercial vehicles, and aviation which includes 69 airports.
The Intracoastal Waterway is an important means of transporting commercial goods such as petroleum and petroleum products, agricultural produce, building materials and manufactured goods.
In 2011, Louisiana ranked among the five deadliest states for debris/litter –caused vehicle accidents per total number of registered vehicles and population size. Figures derived from[28] the NTSHA show at least 25 persons in Louisiana were killed each year in motor vehicle collisions with non-fixed objects, including debris, dumped litter, animals and their carcasses.
Expansion of slavery
In 1709, French financier Antoine Crozat obtained a monopoly of commerce in the French dominion of Louisiana that extended from the Gulf of Mexico to what is now Illinois. "That concession allowed him to bring in a cargo of blacks from Africa every year," the British historian Hugh Thomas wrote.[41]
When France sold the Louisiana territory to the United States in 1803, it was soon accepted that enslaved Africans could be brought there as easily as they were brought to neighboring Mississippi though it violated U.S. law to do so.[42] Though Louisiana was, at the start of the 19th century, a small producer of sugar with a relatively small number of slaves, it soon became a big sugar producer after plantation owners purchased enslaved people who had been transported from Africa and then to South Carolina before being sold in Louisiana where plantation owners forced the captive labor to work at no pay on their growing sugar cane plantations. Despite demands by United States Rep. James Hillhouse and by the pamphleteer Thomas Paine to enforce existing federal law against slavery in the newly acquired territory.,[42] slavery prevailed because it was the source of great profits and the lowest cost labor. The last Spanish governor of the Louisiana territory wrote that "Truly, it is impossible for lower Louisiana to get along without slaves" and with the use of slaves, the colony had been "making great strides toward prosperity and wealth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities,_towns,_and_villages_in_Louisiana
Energy
Louisiana is rich in petroleum and natural gas. Petroleum and gas deposits are found in abundance both onshore and offshore in State-owned waters. In addition, vast petroleum and natural gas reserves are found offshore from Louisiana in the federally administered Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) in the Gulf of Mexico. According to the Energy Information Administration, the Gulf of Mexico OCS is the largest U.S. petroleum-producing region. Excluding the Gulf of Mexico OCS, Louisiana ranks fourth in petroleum production and is home to about 2 percent of total U.S. petroleum reserves. One third of the oil produced in the United States comes from offshore, and 80% of offshore production comes from deep water off Louisiana. The oil industry employs about 58,000 Louisiana residents and has created another 260,000 oil-related jobs, accounting for about 17% of all Louisiana jobs.[65]
Louisiana's natural gas reserves account for about 5 percent of the U.S. total. The recent discovery of the Haynesville Shale formation in parts of or all of Caddo, Bossier, Bienville, Sabine, De Soto, Red River, Sabine, and Natchitoches parishes have made it the world's fourth largest gas field with some wells initially producing over 25 million cubic feet of gas daily.[66] Louisiana was the first site of petroleum drilling over water in the world, onCaddo Lake in the northwest corner of the state. The petroleum and gas industry, as well as its subsidiary industries such as transport andrefining, have dominated Louisiana's economy since the 1940s. Beginning in 1950, Louisiana was sued several times by the U.S. Interior Department, in efforts by the federal government to strip Louisiana of its submerged land property rights. These control vast stores of reservoirs of petroleum and natural gas.
When petroleum and gas boomed in the 1970s, so did Louisiana's economy. The Louisiana economy as well as its politics of the last half-century cannot be understood without thoroughly accounting for the influence of the petroleum and gas industries. Since the 1980s, these industries' headquarters have consolidated in Houston, but many of the jobs that operate or provide logistical support to the U.S. Gulf of Mexico crude-oil-and-gas industry remained in Louisiana as of 2010.
Topography
Louisiana is bordered to the west by Texas; to the north by Arkansas; to the east by the state ofMississippi; and to the south by the Gulf of Mexico.
The surface of the state may properly be divided into two parts, the uplands of the north, and thealluvial along the coast. The alluvial region includes low swamp lands, coastal marshlands and beaches, and barrier islands that cover about 20,000 square miles (52,000 km2). This area lies principally along the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River, which traverses the state from north to south for a distance of about 600 miles (1,000 km) and empties into the Gulf of Mexico; the Red River; the Ouachita River and its branches; and other minor streams (some of which are calledbayous). The breadth of the alluvial region along the Mississippi is from 10 to 60 miles (15 to 100 km), and along the other rivers the alluvial region averages about 10 miles (15 km) across. The Mississippi River flows along a ridge formed by its own deposits (known as a levee), from which the lands decline toward a river beyond at an average fall of six feet per mile (3 m/km). The alluvial lands along other streams present similar features.
The higher and contiguous hill lands of the north and northwestern part of the state have an area of more than 25,000 square miles (65,000 km2). They consist of prairie and woodlands. The elevations above sea level range from 10 feet (3 m) at the coast and swamp lands to 50 and 60 feet (15–18 m) at the prairie and alluvial lands. In the uplands and hills, the elevations rise to Driskill Mountain, the highest point in the state at only 535 feet (163 m) above sea level.
Besides the navigable waterways already named, there are the Sabine (Sah-BEAN), forming the western boundary; and the Pearl, the eastern boundary; the Calcasieu (KAL-cah-shew), theMermentau, the Vermilion, Bayou Teche, the Atchafalaya (a-CHAF-a-LI-a), the Boeuf (bEHf), Bayou Lafourche, the Courtableau River, Bayou D'Arbonne, the Macon River, the Tensas (TEN-saw), Amite River, the Tchefuncte (CHA-Funk-ta), the Tickfaw, the Natalbany River, and a number of other smaller streams, constituting a natural system of navigable waterways, aggregating over 4,000 miles (6,400 km) long.
The state also has political jurisdiction over the approximately 3-mile (4.8 km)-wide portion of subsealand of the inner continental shelf in the Gulf of Mexico. Through a peculiarity of the political geography of the United States, this is substantially less than the 9-mile (14 km)-wide jurisdiction of nearby states Texas and Florida, which, like Louisiana, have extensive Gulf coastlines.[14]
The southern coast of Louisiana in the United States is among the fastest disappearing areas in the world. This is largely a consequence of human mismanagement of the coast (see Wetlands of Louisiana). At one time, the land actually grew when spring floods from the Mississippi River added sediment and stimulated marsh growth; the land is now shrinking. There are multiple causes.[15]Artificial levees now block spring flood water that would bring fresh water and sediment to marshes. Swamps have been extensively logged, leaving canals and ditches that allow saline water to move inland. Canals dug for the oil and gas industry also allow storms to move sea water inland where it damages swamps and marshes. Rising sea waters have exacerbated the problem. Some estimates conclude that the state is losing a land mass equivalent to 30 football fields every day. There are many proposals to save coastal areas by reducing human damage, including restoring natural floods from the Mississippi. Without such restoration, coastal communities will continue to disappear.[16]And as the communities disappear, more and more people are leaving the region.[17] Since the coastal wetlands also support an economically important coastal fishery, the loss of wetlands will also negatively affect this industry.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYBND644riM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4U1VbT1QiM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYn6tPv0Slw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bneuuVA3Zuk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWdYGoZ8K8w
Surprise! One more great performance:
I had never heard of this man before, but he is right on with the sound of New Orleans. Always, great surprises on You Tube!! Love to everybody!!!!!!!!!!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXGMYpBilrY
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.thecajuns.com/images/parishes.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.thecajuns.com/parishes.htm&h=545&w=662&sz=21&tbnid=1Ns-E-fakUadVM:&tbnh=83&tbnw=101&zoom=1&usg=__hWF4hf-oHt51GAbqP2pOTmEM0Gs=&docid=1FLMHSyM0VrkmM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Q0oGUfrCO8Si2QWQ8YGwDA&ved=0CDgQ9QEwAg&dur=4869
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://parishmapslouisiana.com/aalagifs/louisianacountymap.gif&imgrefurl=http://parishmapslouisiana.com/&h=430&w=468&sz=60&tbnid=IkTkQXP_t74DRM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=98&zoom=1&usg=__bRdAUJOjTTuCF0mGNjZJ0D-tEG4=&docid=ld8O0sfQTdwQAM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=R0sGUb7JC4ro2gXFqIHQCQ&ved=0CEoQ9QEwAw&dur=86
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://geology.com/state-map/maps/louisiana-rivers-map.gif&imgrefurl=http://geology.com/lakes-rivers-water/louisiana.shtml&h=706&w=750&sz=78&tbnid=aT0v5Cji1E27dM:&tbnh=91&tbnw=97&zoom=1&usg=__nIaoO9tfTH_9hPWgjghx1AP_ZPs=&docid=4oVd28kHL8RYnM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=yUsGUd7IHoK9qgHvjYHYDw&ved=0CFYQ9QEwBQ&dur=896
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://geology.com/cities-map/map-of-louisiana-cities.gif&imgrefurl=http://geology.com/cities-map/louisiana.shtml&h=705&w=750&sz=92&tbnid=cKAuAcKBY7H-kM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=96&zoom=1&usg=__883PlRaWTcIth7tj7Dk1T25xD3U=&docid=ePy3-a9dKyhKcM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=j0wGUa_AEcvaqwH16YCgDg&ved=0CDIQ9QEwAA&dur=688
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Louisiana.JPG
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