Stack Island, River island in Mississippi River, United States
Stack Island is a river island sitting in the middle of the Mississippi River, close to the town of Lake Providence near the border of Mississippi and Louisiana. The island sits entirely within the river channel, with no bridge or road connection to either bank.
In the late 1700s, the island was known as a base for river pirates who preyed on cargo boats traveling the Mississippi. A series of powerful earthquakes in the early 1800s, part of the New Madrid seismic events, reshaped it so dramatically that its outline and position changed.
The name Stack Island appears in old river navigation records, linking it to the era when the Mississippi was the main highway of the interior. Today the island has no permanent human use and is left almost entirely to wildlife.
The island can only be reached by boat, and there are no facilities or marked paths once ashore. Water levels on the Mississippi vary greatly by season, so conditions for approaching the island change throughout the year.
Because the earthquakes shifted the island so far from its original position, the states of Mississippi and Louisiana ended up disputing which of them actually owned it, and the case reached the US Supreme Court in 1995. It is one of the very few times a geological event directly triggered a boundary dispute decided at that level.
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