Publications

Pit lakes, a common product of open pit mining techniques, may become long-term, post-mining environmental risks or long-term, post-mining water resources depending upon management decisions. This study reviews two published pit lake modeling studies and one pit lake monitoring program in order to increase the transparency of approaches used in pit lake prediction and management. The first model i

Pit lakes are permanent hydrologic/landscape features that can result from open pit mining for metals, coal, uranium, diamonds, oil sands, and aggregates. Risks associated with pit lakes include local and regional impacts to water quality and related impacts to aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Stakeholders rely on predictive models of water chemistry to prepare for and manage these risks. This

Hand-collected grab samples are the most common water sampling method but using grab sampling to monitor temporally variable aquatic processes such as diel metal cycling or episodic events is rarely feasible or cost-effective. Currently available automated samplers are a proven, widely used technology and typically collect up to 24 samples during a deployment. However, these automated samplers are

Middle Jurassic strata of the Gaikema Sandstone were deposited about 170 million years ago on a delta that was located on the western shoreline of the Cook Inlet basin (Detterman and Hartsock, 1966; LePain and others, 2011, 2013). The delta was built by swift, sediment-laden rivers that flowed southeastward from a mountainous volcanic terrane west of the Bruin Bay fault (fig. 6-1). Upon reaching t

Many epithermal gold-silver deposits are temporally and spatially associated with late Oligocene to Pliocene magmatism of the southern ancestral Cascade arc in western Nevada and eastern California. These deposits, which include both quartz-adularia (low- and intermediate-sulfidation; Comstock Lode, Tonopah, Bodie) and quartz-alunite (high-sulfidation; Goldfield, Paradise Peak) types, were major p

Water column redox conditions, degree of restriction of the depositional basin, and other paleoenvironmental parameters have been determined for the Mississippian Kuna Formation of northwestern Alaska from stratigraphic profiles of Mo, Fe/Al, and S isotopes in pyrite, C isotopes in organic matter, and N isotopes in bulk rock. This unit is important because it hosts the Red Dog and Anarraaq Zn-Pb-A

During the late morning of March 22, 2014, a devastating landslide occurred near the town of Oso, Washington. The landslide with an estimated volume of 10.9 million cubic yards (8.3 x 106 m3) of both intact glacially deposited and previously disturbed landslide sediments, reached speeds averaging 40 miles per hour (64 kilometers per hour) and crossed the entire 2/3-mile (~1100 m) width of the adja

The perennial shrub Larrea tridentata is widely successful in North American warm deserts but is also susceptible to climatic perturbations. Understanding its response to rainfall variability requires consideration of multiple timescales. We examine intra-annual to multi-year relationships using model simulations of soil moisture and vegetation growth over 50 years in the Mojave National Preserve

The biotic ligand model (BLM) is a numerical approach that couples chemical speciation calculations with toxicological information to predict the toxicity of aquatic metals. This approach was proposed as an alternative to expensive toxicological testing, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency incorporated the BLM into the 2007 revised aquatic life ambient freshwater quality criteria for Cu.

Forty years ago, the demolition of large dams was mostly fiction, notably plotted in Edward Abbey's novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. Its 1975 publication roughly coincided with the end of large-dam construction in the United States. Since then, dams have been taken down in increasing numbers as they have filled with sediment, become unsafe or inefficient, or otherwise outlived their usefulness (1) (s

This paper reviews the basic chemistry of cyanide, methods by which cyanide can be analyzed, and aspects of cyanide behavior that are most relevant to environmental considerations at mineral processing operations associated with gold mines. The emphasis is on research results reported since 1999 and on data gathered for a series of U.S. Geological Survey studies that began in the late 1990s. Cyani

Luminescence dating provides a direct age estimate of the time of last exposure of quartz or feldspar minerals to light or heat and has been successfully applied to deposits, rock surfaces, and fired materials in a number of archaeological and geological settings. Sampling strategies are diverse and can be customized depending on local circumstances, although all sediment samples need to include a