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The meander took the Mississippi so far west that it ran into the Atchafalaya, at that time a distributary of a different river, the Red, which itself was a Mississippi tributary.

And at the center of the struggle is the Atchafalaya river, a 135 mile-long distributary of the Mississippi River that empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

The course of history is full of confluences and meanders, oxbows, watersheds, dams and floods, tributaries and distributaries.

Every 1,000 years or so, it abandoned its main channel for one of its distributaries.

Saline water has long been invading the delta, but because of the drought there is not enough fresh water in the river and its distributaries to dilute the seawater.