According to a new study, Hurricanes Rita and Katrina have caused one of the most serious ecological disasters ever. A simple comparison between satellite images before and after the storms revealed that Rita and Katrina produced practically the largest ecological catastrophe on record in the United States.

Researchers from Tulane University estimated that in Mississippi and Louisiana about 320 million trees were killed by the strong storms the two hurricanes brought. The scientists also warned that this ecological disaster will have a major negative effect on the global greenhouse gas buildup.

Although the problem was initially represented by the fact that the storms killed lots of trees and produced important quantities of stagnant water, the disaster became a real ecological catastrophe because of the carbon that the dying vegetation produced. The nation’s forests would be able to absorb the quantity of gas that was put into the air with this occasion in a whole year of photosynthesis.

It is obvious that the two hurricanes have had consequences related also to the species from the effected areas. A major imbalance between some aggressive and invasive species and the more environmentally productive native ones has been produced; although $504 million were promised through a federal program, the whole amount of money has never come and the people haven’t been able to limit the damage. The institutions and their slow, bureaucratic mechanisms were accused implicitly by the ones who studied the problem.

Although "this is the worst environmental disaster in the United States since the Exxon Valdez accident... and the greatest forest destruction in modern times," as James Cummins, the executive director of the conservative group Wildlife Mississippi, said, the necessary “broad and aggressive response […] just hasn’t happened” yet. The United States’ Forest Service and Farm Service Agency focused mainly on the economic losses caused by the hurricanes ($2 billion), but no one seems to have taken into account the major ecological effects of the storms.

The new study conducted by the researchers at Tulane University was based on images from two NASA satellites and it was published on Friday in the journal “Science.”