Images

A USGS technician surveys the seafloor bathymetry using a personal watercraft outfitted with global positioning systems (GPS) and echo sounders.

Location: Santa Cruz, California (near Wharf).

Photograph of a USGS technician on a USGS coastal survey vessel that maps seafloor bathymetry using global positioning systems (GPS) and echo sounders.

Location:Santa Cruz, California (near Wharf).

A USGS technician surveys the seafloor bathymetry using a personal watercraft outfitted with global positioning systems (GPS) and echo sounders.

Location: Santa Cruz, California (near Steamers Lane).

A USGS technician surveys the seafloor bathymetry using a personal watercraft outfitted with global positioning systems (GPS) and echo sounders.

Location:Santa Cruz, California (near Santa Cruz Boardwalk).

USGS scientist Jackson Currie deploys a chirp sub-bottom profiler (in the center) from research vessel Parke Snavely. The chirp is attached to pontoons to keep the equipment from running aground in the shallow waters of San Pablo Bay, California.

Visitors at Glines Canyon East Abutment in Olympic National Park, the location of the Elwha River Restoration project. Image available at Olympic National Park flickr site.

Scientists recover the Benthic OBservation camera Sled, or “BOB Sled,” onto the research vessel Parke Snavely

Photograph from a mounted time-lapse camera looking eastward along Barter Island’s north shore document how the coastal bluffs and beach changed during a single summer. The photograph shows a late-summer extreme storm with waves crashing into the bluff (September 3, 2014).

Photograph from a mounted time-lapse camera looking eastward along Barter Island’s north shore document how the coastal bluffs and beach changed during a single summer. The photograph shows a summer storm from the west eroding the beach (July 25, 2014).

Photographs from a mounted time-lapse camera looking eastward along Barter Island’s north shore document how the coastal bluffs and beach changed during a single summer. Photograph B: Ice-free and wide beach; dark-colored material on beach is fine-grained sediment eroded from bluffs (July 10, 2014).

Photo from a time-lapse camera looking eastward along the north shore of Barter Island on Alaska’s Arctic coast, June 15, 2014. View the complete time-lapse sequence to see how the coastal bluffs and beach changed during a single summer.

Underwater photo of a healthy coral reef.

Large swells from the north-northeast with heights up to 5 meters (16 feet) combined with unusually high tides inundated much of the Republic of the Marshall Islands on March 2, 2014.

Waves wash over a road on Roi-Namur Island, Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, during a particularly high tidal event. USGS is studying how slightly reduced rainfall combined with sea-level rise affect freshwater sources on low-lying Pacific coral islands.

After dam removal on the Elwha River, the site of a previous survey had finer grained sediment. Surveyor in the distance is James Starr of the USGS Washington Water Science Center.

Wave-driven flooding and overwash on Roi-Namur Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands

Wave-driven flooding and overwash on Roi-Namur Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands

Schematic geologic cross section of Southern Oʻahu showing groundwater–seawater interaction in the vicinity of Honolulu, HI (modified from Frans et al., 2012).

Satellite image of Hawaiʻi captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite on January 26, 2014

BOBSled suspended by its tow cable. The tow cable has one single-mode fiber-optic line for video transmission, eight conductors for system power and control, a Kevlar layer for strength, and a urethane jacket for abrasion resistance and water exclusion.

An inflatable boat floating above a submarine groundwater vent was used as a multi-day mooring platform for making time-series measurements of the naturally occurring groundwater tracers radon (²²²Rn) and thoron (²²⁰Rn). Gray surface buoys closer to the beach mark locations of thermistor arrays and wave/tide gauges.