Images

USGS scientists Bruce Jaffe and Bruce Richmond visited Japan following the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami. They collected time-sensitive data to help determine the height of tsunami waves at various sites and the distances the waves traveled inland.

The March 11, 2011, tsunami destroyed most buildings in Yuriage, leaving exposed foundations and scattered debris. The tsunami flow was about 8 m (26 ft) deep here and moved a stone monument off the top of the artificial hill in the background on the left side of the photograph.

Four tan cables, each 6 kilometers long, trail behind R/V Marcus G. Langseth. These cables record seismic sound waves that travel down into the Earth and reflect back from layers beneath the seafloor. The green cables provide the sound.

Damage as seen in Natori, Japan, in May 2011. The March 11, 2011 magnitude 9.1 earthquake off the east coast of Japan caused an epic tsunami. USGS scientist standing near the wrecked boat, and a car on the road, provide scale. Damage to the building indicates a 10-meter flow depth.

Research vessel (R/V) Marcus G. Langseth, operated by Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory's Office of Marine Operations, can deploy several kilometers of cable to collect seismic data from beneath the seafloor.

A sailboat gets stuck under the Murray Street bridge over Santa Cruz Harbor in California, after it was washed free of its dock due to the strength of the tsunami wave from Japan. While the tsunami energy that hit the coast of California was relatively low, the wave energy is concentrated in narrow spaces like harbors.

February 25, 2011, San Pablo Bay data collection. At left, the platform at the Lower station is partly exposed to the air shortly after low tide. At right, the platform on mudflat at the Upper station is completely exposed to the air shortly after low tide on February 25, 2011.

Unusually high tides, sometimes called "king tides," offer a preview of coastal flooding likely to result from rising sea level. In this photograph, taken during a king tide on February 17, 2011, waves overtop Pier 14 in San Francisco, California.

A rotary sediment trap deployed in a channel on the reef flat off Puʻukoholā Heiau National Historic Site, Hawaiʻi, designed to collect samples of sediment being transported across the reef.

Jenny White (USGS PCMSC) and Lissa MacVean (USGS PCMSC) deploy an instrumented frame in the shallows of San Pablo Bay (northern San Francisco Bay) from R/V Retriever. The instrument is an ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler).

At left, USGS Marine Technician Jenny White steadies an instrumented platform as it is winched into the water at the Middle station (see map of study area), where the depth of the bay floor is 0.5 m below MLLW. Photograph taken February 2, 2011, by Lissa MacVean.

On February 1, 2011, the USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center (PCMSC) team carried out a project using interferometric sidescan sonar to characterize the riverbed and channel banks of a 12 mile reach of the Sacramento River near the town of Knights Landing, California (River Mile 79 through River Mile 91).

Bathymetry—the measurement of water depth of a body of water (e.g., ocean, sea, river, bay, lake, etc.)

Estimated coastal inundation (blue shading) at Mission Bay in San Diego, California, using the Coastal Storm Modeling System (CoSMoS) developed for ARkStorm. (From USGS Open-File Report 2010-1312.) 

The ARkStorm scenario led by the USGS and hundreds of scientists and experts from many disciplines details impacts of a scientifically plausible storm similar to the Great California Storm of 1862 in the modern day.

Jumbo piston corer on deck of United States Coast Guard Cutter Healy in the Arctic Ocean.

In 2010, USGS researcher Brian Edwards recovers white chunks of gas hydrate (methane ice) mixed with gray sediment from a metal core sample tube retrieved from the seafloor in the Arctic Ocean at a water depth of approximately 8,000 feet.

Cross section of a hydrothermal vent chimney from East Diamante Caldera in the Mariana volcanic arc, west Pacific Ocean, collected during a 2010 research cruise. Most of the sample is zinc sulfide.

Cross section of a hydrothermal vent chimney from East Diamante Caldera in the Mariana volcanic arc, west Pacific Ocean, collected during a 2010 research cruise. Most of the sample is zinc sulfide.

John Pohlman (USGS, left) and colleagues from the University of Alaska Fairbanks examine a sediment core retrieved through winter ice from the bottom of a lake in northern Alaska. Such cores are used to reconstruct methane emissions and climate history over the past 20,000 years.

Bluff erosion during the 2009–10 El Niño undermined the Great Highway guardrail at Ocean Beach, San Francisco, California. The shoreline eroded, on average, 55 meters that winter, leading to lane closures on the highway and an emergency $5-million revetment along the base of this bluff.