Louisiana has dropped $18 million on a 10,800-square-foot model of Big Muddy’s sinuous meanders. It’s made of 216 panels of high-density foam, carved to match mapping data down to a quarter-millimeter tolerance. Sure, the Center for River Studies could have just simulated all this in a supercomputer, built from spreadsheets and algebra. And that’s typically what happens nowadays: IRL models of natural phenomena are the exception. But when you can watch in an hour how the river bottom could transform in the course of, say, a year—and directly observe the potential effects on navigation—the impact is more immediate.
My video is at DLive