Images

A ship will tow this green cable, which contains underwater microphones that record sound reflected off layers beneath the seafloor. USGS scientists will use the data to pinpoint the location of faults.

Large waves breaking on cliffs in western Santa Cruz, California, February 13, 2016.

The USGS Coastal and Estuarine Dynamics Group will be deploying a Nanopod at Pea Island DUNEX experiment site to collect oceanographic information.

USGS scientists survey a beach near San Francisco to assist with a comparison of data derived from aerial photos and lidar.

The coastal bluff along East Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz, California are especially vulnerable to rising sea level during big storms. Sometimes even the rip-rap, put in place to protect roadways and homes, cannot protect the bluffs from erosion.

View of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk amusement park in Santa Cruz, California. Photo was taken from the bluff on East Cliff Drive, east of the San Lorenzo River mouth. Sand on the beach gets eroded, redistributed, and deposited due to the dynamic conditions brought about by storms and changing river flow.

Waves flood across a coastal road near Santa Cruz, California.

On remote Barter Island, Alaska, Bruce Richmond (right) and Cordell Johnson drill into 500-foot-thick permafrost using a handheld drill with a 2-inch drill bit—a challenging task! It can take 3 hours to drill nearly 20 feet down.

Study region along the Queen Charlotte-Fairweather fault offshore southeastern Alaska. Rectangles show locations of the two USGS-led marine geophysical surveys in May and August 2015. The third cruise was offshore Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, and southern Alaska in September 2015.

Santa Barbara Channel region, showing locations of six California Seafloor Mapping Program (CSMP) map sets (red rectangles) and the outer boundary of California’s State Waters (yellow line).

Gray-scale perspective view of Rincon Point, the subaerial part of a delta formed by boulders deposited at the mouth of Rincon Creek. A relict submerged boulder delta, formed by similar processes during lower stands of sea level, extends 1,500 meters offshore. Relief on this submerged delta causes wave refraction and a world-class surfbreak (inset image).

USGS Ocean Engineer Gerry Hatcher (left) monitors the view of the seafloor from the camera mounted on the Mini Muc and communicates with the ship’s bridge while USGS engineering technician Pete Dal Ferro uses a remote winch control to position the Mini Muc and trigger coring.

A personal watercraft ready to survey the surf zone, with custom waterproof displays linked to an echo sounder and a precision GPS receiver. These surveys require special training and permits.

Pamela Swarzenski from the USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center sampling gas released by gas hydrate breakdown during a quantitative degassing aboard the drilling vessel Chikyu during the Indian Government’s National Gas Hydrates Program (NGHP-02) drilling expedition offshore from eastern India.

Engineering technician Tim Elfers of the USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center navigates a personal watercraft (PWC) through waves offshore of central California. The PWC is equipped with sonar and GPS in order to map the nearshore seafloor.

Cliff erosion is a common storm-induced hazard along the West Coast. Two condemned apartment buildings along Esplanade Avenue in Pacifica, California are shown here before their demolition in 2016 and 2017.

Science crew aboard R/V Marcus G. Langseth. Ray Sliter (Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center) and Deb Hutchison (Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center) shown at far left.

The relatively new camera stations at Santa Cruz and Madeira Beach have not yet imaged many rip channels, so this is an example from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Field Research Facility in Duck, North Carolina. In this time-averaged image from video taken September 1, 2015, the dark horizontal bands perpendicular to the beach indicate rip channels.

Left: USGS research hydrologist Mark Reid (left) and USGS research geologist Kevin Schmidt collect GPS data along the Big Sur coast on September 19, 2007. Photo credit: Maiana Hanshaw, USGS (now with swisstopo).

These clams (Calyptogena spp.) were discovered in about 1000 meter-deep waters off the southern tip of Alaska near a 250-meter-high cone rising from the seafloor and 10 kilometers from the Queen Charlotte-Fairweather fault.

A vibracore taken from a marshy area in Anahola Valley, Kaua‛i reveals a sandier mud layer.