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Publications

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

Filter Total Items: 1331

Marine paleoseismic evidence for seismic and aseismic slip along the Hayward-Rodgers Creek fault system in northern San Pablo Bay

Distinguishing between seismic and aseismic fault slip in the geologic record is difficult, yet fundamental to estimating the seismic potential of faults and the likelihood of multi-fault ruptures. We integrated chirp sub-bottom imaging with targeted cross-fault coring and core analyses of sedimentary proxy data to characterize vertical deformation and slip behavior within an extensional fault ben
Authors
Janet Watt, Mary McGann, Renee K. Takesue, Thomas Lorenson

Late Holocene environmental change in Celestun Lagoon, Yucatan, Mexico

Epikarst estuary response to hydroclimate change remains poorly understood, despite the well-studied link between climate and karst groundwater aquifers. The influence of sea-level rise and coastal geomorphic change on these estuaries obscures climate signals, thus requiring careful development of paleoenvironmental histories to interpret the paleoclimate archives. We used foraminifera assemblages
Authors
Kyle Hardage, Joseph Street, Jorge A. Herrera-Silveira, Ferdinand Oberle, Adina Paytan

Digital Twin Earth - Coasts: Developing a fast and physics-informed surrogate model for coastal floods via neural operators

Developing fast and accurate surrogates for physics-based coastal and ocean mod- els is an urgent need due to the coastal flood risk under accelerating sea level rise, and the computational expense of deterministic numerical models. For this purpose, we develop the first digital twin of Earth coastlines with new physics-informed machine learning techniques extending the state-of-art Neural Operato
Authors
P. Jiang, N. Meinert, H. Jordão, C. Weisser, S. Holgate, A. Lavin, B. Lutjens, D. Newman, H. Wainright, C. Walker, Patrick L. Barnard

Knowledge gaps update to the 2019 IPCC special report on the ocean and cryosphere: Prospects to refine coastal flood hazard assessments and adaptation strategies with at-risk communities of Alaska

This article reviews the status of knowledge gaps and co-production process challenges that impede coastal flood hazard resilience planning in communities of northwestern Alaska, where threat levels are high. Discussion focuses on the state of knowledge arising after preparation of the 2019 IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate and highlights prospects to address ur
Authors
Dee Williams, Li H. Erikson

A characterization of deep-sea coral and sponge communities along the California and Oregon coast using a remotely operated vehicle on the EXPRESS 2018 expedition

Deep-sea coral and sponge (DSCS) communities serve as essential fish habitats (EFH) by providing shelter and nursery habitat, increasing diversity, and increasing prey availability (Freese and Wing, 2003; Bright, 2007; Baillon et al., 2012; Henderson et al., 2020). Threats to these long-lived, fragile organisms from bottom contact fishing gear, potential offshore renewable energy development, and
Authors
Tom Laidig, Diana Watters, Nancy G. Prouty, Meredith Everett, Lizzie Duncan, Liz Clarke, Chris Caldow, Amanda Demopoulos

Changes in liquefaction severity in the San Francisco Bay Area with sea-level rise

This paper studies the impacts of sea-level rise on liquefaction triggering and severity around the San Francisco Bay Area, California, for the M 7.0 “HayWired” earthquake scenario along the Hayward fault. This work emerged from stakeholder engagement for the US Geological Survey releases of the HayWired earthquake scenario and the Coastal Storm Modeling System projects, in which local planners an
Authors
Alex R. R. Grant, Anne Wein, Kevin M. Befus, Juliette Finzi-Hart, Mike Frame, Rachel Volentine, Patrick L. Barnard, Keith L. Knudsen

California deepwater investigations and groundtruthing (Cal DIG) I: Fault and shallow geohazard analysis offshore Morro Bay

The California Deepwater Investigations and Groundtruthing (Cal DIG) I project focuses on the potential seafloor hazards and impacts of alternative energy infrastructure in the outer continental shelf region offshore of south-central California. This is one of three reports covering a single study area located between Monterey and Point Conception, California in federal waters outside of the State

Authors
Maureen A. L. Walton, Charlie K Paull, Guy R. Cochrane, Jason A. Addison, Roberto Gwiazda, Daniel J. Kennedy, Eve M. Lundsten, Antoinette Gabrielle Papesh

Projecting climate dependent coastal flood risk with a hybrid statistical dynamical model

Numerical models for tides, storm surge, and wave runup have demonstrated ability to accurately define spatially varying flood surfaces. However these models are typically too computationally expensive to dynamically simulate the full parameter space of future oceanographic, atmospheric, and hydrologic conditions that will constructively compound in the nearshore to cause both extreme event and nu
Authors
D. L. Anderson, P. Ruggiero, F. J. Mendez, Patrick L. Barnard, Li H. Erikson, Andrea C. O'Neill, M. Merrifield, A. Rueda, L. Cagigal, J. M. Marra

Characterization of the biological, physical, and chemical properties of a toxic thin layer in a temperate marine system

The distribution of plankton in the ocean is patchy across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. One type of oceanographic feature that exemplifies this patchiness is a ‘thin layer’. Thin layers are subsurface aggregations of plankton that range in vertical thickness from centimeters to a few meters, which may extend horizontally for kilometers and persist for days. We undertook a field cam
Authors
Margaret A McManus, Adam T Greer, Amanda HV Timmerman, Jeff C Sevadjian, C. Brock Woodson, Robert Cowen, Derek A Fong, Stephen G. Monismith, Olivia Cheriton

Seven decades of coastal change at Barter Island, Alaska: Exploring the importance of waves and temperature on erosion of coastal permafrost bluffs

Observational data of coastal change over much of the Arctic are limited largely due to its immensity, remoteness, harsh environment, and restricted periods of sunlight and ice-free conditions. Barter Island, Alaska, is one of the few locations where an extensive, observational dataset exists, which enables a detailed assessment of the trends and patterns of coastal change over decadal to annual t
Authors
Ann E. Gibbs, Li H. Erikson, Benjamin M. Jones, Bruce M. Richmond, Anita C Engelstad

Numerical simulation of the boundary layer flow generated in Monterey Bay, California by the 2010 Chilean tsunami: Case study

This work presents a case study involving the numerical simulation of the unsteady boundary layer generated by the 2010 Chilean tsunami, as measured by field equipment in Monterey Bay, California, USA. A one-dimensional vertical (1DV) boundary layer model is utilized, solving Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations, coupled with two-equation k–ω turbulence closure. Local effects of convective ac
Authors
Athanasios Makris, Jessica R. Lacy, David R. Fuhrman

Earthquake magnitude distributions on northern Caribbean faults from combinatorial optimization models

On-fault earthquake magnitude distributions are calculated for northern Caribbean faults using estimates of fault slip and regional seismicity parameters. Integer programming, a combinatorial optimization method, is used to determine the optimal spatial arrangement of earthquakes sampled from a truncated Gutenberg-Richter distribution that minimizes the global misfit in slip rates on a complex fau

Authors
Eric L. Geist, Uri S. ten Brink