Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Publications

Scientific reports, journal articles, and information products produced by USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center scientists.

USGS Pubs Warehouse

Photo of library shelves full of books

Browse the USGS Publications Warehouse to broaden your search with enhanced filtering.

USGS Pubs Warehouse

Sound Waves Newsletter

Coastline with data plotted on top to quantify the amount of damage caused by hurricanes.

Browse issues of the Sound Waves newsletter, featuring coastal and marine research news from across the USGS.

Read Newsletter
Filter Total Items: 1337

Pharmaceuticals and personal care products in passive samplers at seven coastal sites off West Maui, Hawaiʻi:

Passive membrane samplers—semipermeable membrane devices and polar organic chemical integrative samplers—were deployed for 22 continuous days at 7 sites along the West Maui, Hawaiʻi, coastline in February and March 2017 to assess organic contaminants at shallow coral reef ecosystems from diverse upstream inputs. The distribution of organic compounds observed at these coastal sites showed considera
Authors
Pamela L. Campbell, Nancy G. Prouty, Curt D. Storlazzi
By
Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center, Organic Geochemistry Laboratory

Categorizing active marine acoustic sources based on their potential to affect marine animals

Marine acoustic sources are widely used for geophysical imaging, oceanographic sensing, and communicating with and tracking objects or robotic vehicles in the water column. Under the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act and similar regulations in several other countries, the impact of controlled acoustic sources is assessed based on whether the sound levels received by marine mammals meet the criteri
Authors
Carolyn D. Ruppel, T.S. Weber, Erica Staaterman, Stanley Labak, Patrick E. Hart
By
Coastal and Marine Hazards and Resources Program, Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center, Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center, Deep Sea Exploration, Mapping and Characterization

Mass wasting along the Cascadia subduction zone: Implications for abyssal turbidite sources and the earthquake record

The only submarine records of large (>Mw7) prehistoric earthquakes along the Cascadia subduction zone are derived from sequences of deep sea turbidites interpreted to represent synchronous, shaking-induced failures along the continental slope. However, the spatial correlation of these deposits along the margin is complicated and the chronological constraints involve significant uncertainties, rais
Authors
Jenna C. Hill, Janet Watt, Daniel S. Brothers
By
Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center

A reproducible and reusable pipeline for segmentation of geoscientific imagery

Segmentation of Earth science imagery is an increasingly common task. Among modern techniques that use Deep Learning, the UNet architecture has been shown to be a reliable for segmenting a range of imagery. We developed software–Segmentation Gym–to implement a data-model pipeline for segmentation of scientific imagery using a family of UNet models. With an existing set of imagery and labels, the s
Authors
Daniel Buscombe, Evan B. Goldstein
By
Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center

Fires, floods and other extreme events – How watershed processes under climate change will shape our coastlines

Ongoing sea-level rise has brought renewed focus on terrestrial sediment supply to the coast because of its strong influence on whether and how long beaches, marshes and other coastal landforms may persist into the future. Here, we summarise findings of sediment discharge from several coastal rivers, revealing that infrequent, large-magnitude events have disproportionate influence on the morphodyn
Authors
Jonathan Warrick, Amy E. East, Helen Willemien Dow
By
Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center

Diverse tsunamigenesis triggered by the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption

On the evening of 15 January 2022, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano1 unleashed a violent underwater eruption, blanketing the surrounding land masses in ash and debris. The eruption generated tsunamis observed around the world. An event of this type last occurred in 1883 during the eruption of Krakatau, and thus we have the first observations of a tsunami from a large emergent volcanic eruptio
Authors
Patrick Lynett, Maile McCann, Zili Zhou, Willington Renteria, Jose Borrero, Dougal Greer, 'Ofa Fa'anunu, Cyprien Bosserelle, Bruce E. Jaffe, SeanPaul La Selle, Andrew C. Ritchie, Alexander G. Snyder, Brandon Nasr, Jaqueline Bott, Nicholas A Graehl, Costas Synolakis, Behzad Ebrahimi, Ezgi Cinar
By
Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center

Element concentrations and grain size of sediment from the Similkameen River above Enloe Dam (Enloe Reservoir) near Oroville, Washington, 2019

In 2019, the U.S. Geological Survey conducted a reconnaissance survey of concentrations of 41 trace elements present in bed sediment in the reservoir on the Similkameen River upstream from Enloe Dam, near Oroville, Washington. The Similkameen River drains a watershed containing highly mineralized geologic deposits with current (2019) and historical mining activity. Results of this survey indicated

Authors
Stephen E. Cox, Christopher A. Curran, Andrew R. Spanjer, Chad C. Opatz, Renee K. Takesue, J. Lynn Bell
By
Water Resources Mission Area, Coastal and Marine Hazards and Resources Program, Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center, Washington Water Science Center

Reproducibility and variability of earthquake subsidence estimates from saltmarshes of a Cascadia estuary

We examine fossil foraminiferal assemblages from 20 sediment cores to assess sudden relative sea-level (RSL) changes across three mud-over-peat contacts at three salt marshes in northern Humboldt Bay, California (~44.8°N, -124.2°W). We use a validated foraminiferal-based Bayesian transfer function to evaluate the variability of subsidence stratigraphy at a range of 30-6000 m across an estuary. We
Authors
Jason Scott Padgett, Simon E. Engelhart, Harvey M. Kelsey, Robert C. Witter, Niamh Cahill
By
Ecosystems Mission Area, Natural Hazards Mission Area, Coastal and Marine Hazards and Resources Program, Alaska Science Center, Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center

Crowd-sourced SfM: Best practices for high resolution monitoring of coastal cliffs and bluffs

Structure from motion (SfM) photogrammetry is an increasingly common technique for measuring landscape change over time by deriving 3D point clouds and surface models from overlapping photographs. Traditional change detection approaches require photos that are geotagged with a differential GPS (DGPS) location, which requires expensive equipment that can limit the ability of communities and researc

Authors
Phillipe Alan Wernette, Ian M. Miller, Andrew C. Ritchie, Jonathan Warrick
By
Natural Hazards Mission Area, Coastal and Marine Hazards and Resources Program, Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center

Crustal permeability changes observed from seismic attenuation: Impacts on multi-mainshock sequences

We use amplitude ratios from narrowband-filtered earthquake seismograms to measure variations of seismic attenuation over time, providing unique insights into the dynamic state of stress in the Earth’s crust at depth. Our dataset from earthquakes of the 2016-2017 Central Apennines sequence allows us to obtain high-resolution time histories of seismic attenuation (frequency band: 0.5-30 Hz) charact
Authors
Luca Malagnini, Thomas E. Parsons, Irene Munafo, Simone Mancini, Margarita Segou, Eric L. Geist
By
Natural Hazards Mission Area, Coastal and Marine Hazards and Resources Program, Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center

Marine minerals in Alaska — A review of coastal and deep-ocean regions

Minerals occurring in marine environments span the globe and encompass a broad range of mineral categories, forming within varied geologic and oceanographic settings. They occur in coastal regions, either from the continuation or mechanical reworking of terrestrial mineralization, as well as in the deep ocean, from diagenetic, hydrogenetic, and hydrothermal processes. The oceans cover most of the

Authors
Amy Gartman, Kira Mizell, Douglas C. Kreiner
By
Ecosystems Mission Area, Coastal and Marine Hazards and Resources Program, Alaska Science Center, Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center, Marine Minerals Laboratory

Impact of climate change on mollusks and other invertebrate resources at the Dominican University of California archaeological site (CA-MRN-254), Marin County, California

We have identified and provided ecological interpretations of 30 taxa recovered at two shellmounds at the Dominican University of California archaeology site in Marin County, California (CA-MRN-254). A Q-mode cluster analysis was used to group the samples according to their faunal similarity. The clusters ranged from a diverse grouping of 100 samples with 27 taxa (Cluster A) to those with a more r
Authors
Mary McGann, Charles L. Powell
By
Coastal and Marine Hazards and Resources Program, Geology, Minerals, Energy, and Geophysics Science Center, Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center
Was this page helpful?