A Tribute to Dr. Sherwood Gagliano — McLindon Geosciences, LLC

Published in the August edition of the NOGS Log by Chris McLindon

Dr. Sherwood “Woody” Gagliano passed away on the morning of July 17, 2020. He was born in New Orleans on December 10, 1935 and was a long-time member of the New Orleans Geological Society. Woody was a geologist’s geologist and one of the great coastal scientists of the last fifty years. Woody’s spirit as a scientist was on full display in his last presentation to NOGS at the April 4, 2016 luncheon. The title of his talk “Geoarcheology of Tectonic Events in South Louisiana” captured the three passions of his life – archeology, faulting and south Louisiana. His presentation embodied the nature of what it is to be a great scientist. He moved freely between the disciplines of geology, archeology, geography and ecology, and spoke with academic authority about each. He combined rigorous scientific investigation with creative out-of-the-box thinking to conclude that many Native American ceremonial centers may have been located along faults because “earthquake effects accompanied by dramatic landscape changes may have influenced their location.” This essential thinking about how humans interact with the natural environment appears to have been a driving force over his sixty-five year career.

Woody began working on a summer internship as a field technician at the LSU Coastal Studies institute in 1955 after his freshman year in Geology. He worked with his life-long friend Roger Saucier on the Quaternary geology and archeology of the Trinity River Delta in Galveston Bay. Twenty-three years later he hired me to work on a summer internship at his company Coastal Environments Inc. on the Quaternary geology of the Colorado River Delta in Matagorda Bay, which started a life-long friendship for me. Gagliano and Saucier shared a fascination with Native American shell middens of coastal Louisiana, which they began exploring as teenagers. Woody would later say that it was the degradation of these mounds that first led him to an interest in the processes of wetlands loss. He received his B.S. in Geology from LSU in 1959, and M.S. in Geography in 1963 and a Ph.D. in Geography, both also from LSU. Woody continued to work at the Coastal Studies Institute throughout this time, and his dissertation “Geoarcheology of the Avery Island Salt Dome” was published as Coastal Studies Series No. 22 in 1967. Between 1961 and 1966 Woody worked with his colleague at CSI James Coleman on a study of the West Bay Subdelta and the South Pass Mudlumps on a project funded by Gulf Oil and Texaco. This work produced the seminal publications “Cyclic Sedimentation in the Mississippi River Deltaic Plain” and “Mudlumps: Diapiric Structures in Mississippi Delta Sediments.”

In 1969 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers put forward a proposal to divert approximately one-third of the total flow of the Mississippi River to Texas and New Mexico to alleviate water shortages in those regions. CSI was awarded the contract to evaluate the proposal, and Gagliano was put in charge of a team of geologists, geomorphologists, hydrologists and climatologists. They produced fifteen technical reports and numerous papers presented at professional meetings including the 1970 report “Deterioration and Restoration of Coastal Wetlands” presented at the 12th International Conference on Coastal Engineering in Washington, DC. The report presented findings on land loss; the effects of petroleum-industry canal dredging on coastal wetlands; use of diversions for restoration; effects of geological faults; as well as a coastal zone management environmental atlas and multi-use management plan. Woody would later note that the study was launched during the advent of the environmental movement and marked the beginning of the coastal restoration program in Louisiana.

It was during this time period that Woody formed his own company, Coastal Environments, Inc. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Coastal Environments was at the forefront of documenting patterns of wetlands loss and studying causal processes. They did work for the Corps, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, EPA, LADOTD and coastal parish governments. By 1990 much of this work was being used by the US Congress to enact the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration Act (CWPRA). CWPRA funding is now a mainstay of Louisiana’s coastal restoration effort. In 1994 Woody prepared “An Environmental – Economic Blueprint for Restoring the Louisiana Coastal Zone” for the Governor’s Office of Coastal Activities and the Wetland Conservation and Restoration Task Force. This provided the foundation for the Coast 2050 project in 1997, which is the foundation of the current Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast.

In 2000 Woody made an unsolicited proposal to the Corps of Engineers to study the contribution of faulting to subsidence and the resulting effects on flood control, navigation, hurricane protection and coastal restoration. He assembled a team of geologists and geographers including E. Burton Kemp, III, Kathy Wiltenmuth Haggar, Dr. Juan Lorenzo, Robert W. Sabate, and Dr. Karen Wicker. Sabate and Haggar both had oil and gas industry experience, and this collaboration led to the first use of industry seismic data to study surface coastal processes. The group used aerial photography and vibracore transects to document surface displacement due to fault movement. Woody also had an intuitive understanding of an important principle of earth science – the best data comes from observations made in the natural environment, and the best observations are made by those who understand the environment best. In addition to collecting their own field data Woody collected anecdotal data from oyster fishermen and camp owners. It was camp owner Pete Hebert’s description of his camp on Bayou Ferrand, which had rapidly submerged between the late 1960s and late 1970s, that led him to study the Bastian Bay fault. He would later refer to this as the “Rosetta Stone” in deciphering the relationships among fault movement, subsidence and wetlands loss. In 2003 the team produced the reports “Active Geological Faults and Land Change in Southeastern Louisiana” for the Corps and “Neo-Tectonic Framework of Southeast Louisiana and Applications to Coastal Restoration.” These works were not universally well received. The Houma Courier reported in 2005 that “Gagliano’s latest theory of what causes coastal land loss scares many people, and there are several entities trying to disprove him.” This may be the most abiding characteristic of a great scientist. Woody was not only able to assemble and work with a wide array of experts and move easily between their disciplines. He stood steadfastly behind their findings once they were published, and didn’t care to curry favor with the popular narratives. For many years he seemed to stand as a “lone voice in the woods” on the importance of faults as agents of change in the wetlands.

The last time I spoke to Woody he called me as I was leaving work. I ended up sitting in the stairwell of the parking garage for the next forty-five minutes talking about geology and the coast; faults and subsidence; the coastal community and the oil and gas industry; and how best to move the science forward. This was one of several such conversations that we had over the past few years. I had generally stayed in touch with Woody since working for him in 1978, but in 2015 we reconnected in a big way. The 2014 publication “Influence of growth faults on coastal fluvial systems: Examples from the late Miocene to the Recent Mississippi River Delta” by UT Austin and Tulane had shown unequivocally that 3-D seismic data could be used to map faults that appeared to extend to the surface, and to investigate their relationship to subsidence. The following year we initiated the NOGS Fault Atlas Project, which was inspired entirely by the work of Woody Gagliano. NOGS project led to the development of The Louisiana Coastal Geohazards Atlas Project with the Louisiana Geological Survey In the following years I had the pleasure of reporting to him that the eight graduate research projects at area universities that were using 3-D data to study faults were not just proving him to right – they were proving him to be way right. Nearly every contention that Woody had made in his early research was proving to be correct, and I now personally believe that fault-related subsidence is the overwhelming cause of wetlands loss in the latter part of the 20th century.

Woody Gagliano has received many accolades for his lifetime of work including being a distinguished lecturer for the Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists, president of the Louisiana Archaeological Society, and vice-president of the Intracoastal Seaway Association. He was awarded the Coastal Stewardship Award for Distinguished Achievement by the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana in 1996 and received their Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. He also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Southwest American Association of Geographers and the LSU Department of Geography and Anthropology Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2018, the James A. Ford Award for contributions to archeology in 1982, and the Charles W. “Buzz” Hair III Memorial Award at the 2013 Louisiana Civil Engineering Conference. I believe that Woody’s greatest accolade will come slowly over the next few decades as coastal scientists look back and recognize him as a man that was ahead of his time.