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Scientific reports, journal articles, and information products produced by USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center scientists.
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Filter Total Items: 1331
Land-based sediment sources and transport to southwest Puerto Rico coral reefs after Hurricane Maria, May 2017 to June 2018
The effects of runoff from land on nearshore ecosystems, including coral reef communities, are influenced by both sediment supply and removal by coastal processes. Integrated studies across the land-sea interface describing sources and transport of terrestrial sediment and its nearshore fate allow reef protection initiatives to target key onshore and offshore areas. Geochemical signatures in the f
Authors
Renee K. Takesue, Clark E Sherman, Aaron O. Reyes, Olivia Cheriton, Natalia I. Ramirez, Roberto Viqueira Ríos, Curt Storlazzi
Carbonate-hosted microbial communities are prolific and pervasive methane oxidizers at geologically diverse marine methane seep sites
At marine methane seeps, vast quantities of methane move through the shallow subseafloor, where it is largely consumed by microbial communities. This process plays an important role in global methane dynamics, but we have yet to identify all of the methane sinks in the deep sea. Here, we conducted a continental-scale survey of seven geologically diverse seafloor seeps and found that carbonate rock
Authors
Jeffrey J. Marlow, Daniel Hoer, Sean Jungbluth, Linda Reynard, Amy Gartman, Marko S. Chavez, Mohamed Y. El-Naggar, Noreen Tuross, Victoria Orphan, Peter R. Girguis
Processing coastal imagery with Agisoft Metashape Professional Edition, version 1.6—Structure from motion workflow documentation
IntroductionStructure from motion (SFM) has become an integral technique in coastal change assessment; the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) used Agisoft Metashape Professional Edition photogrammetry software to develop a workflow that processes coastline aerial imagery collected in response to storms since Hurricane Florence in 2018. This report details step-by-step instructions to create three-dimen
Authors
Jin-Si R. Over, Andrew C. Ritchie, Christine J. Kranenburg, Jenna A. Brown, Daniel D. Buscombe, Tom Noble, Christopher R. Sherwood, Jonathan A. Warrick, Phillipe A. Wernette
By
Ecosystems Mission Area, Natural Hazards Mission Area, Coastal and Marine Hazards and Resources Program, Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Water Science Center, Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center, Southwest Biological Science Center, St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center, Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center, Hurricane Florence, Hurricanes
Recency of faulting and subsurface architecture of the San Diego Bay pull-apart basin, California, USA
In southern California, plate boundary motion between the North American and Pacific plates is distributed across several sub-parallel fault systems. The offshore faults of the California Continental Borderland (CCB) are thought to accommodate ~10-15% of the total plate boundary motion, but the exact distribution of slip and the mechanics of slip partitioning remain uncertain. The Newport-Inglewoo
Authors
Drake Moore Singleton, Jillian M. Maloney, Daniel S. Brothers, Shannon Klotsko, Neal W. Driscoll, Thomas K. Rockwell
Online-coupling of widely-ranged timescales to model coral reef development
The increasing pressure on Earth's ecosystems due to climate change is becoming more and more evident and the impacts of climate change are especially visible on coral reefs. Understanding how climate change interacts with the physical environment of reefs to impact coral growth and reef development is critically important to predicting the persistence of reefs into the future. In this study, a bi
Authors
Gijs Hendrickx, Peter M. J. Herman, Jasper T. Dijkstra, Curt Storlazzi, Lauren Toth
Short communication: evidence for geologic control of rip channels along Prince Edward Island, Canada
Rip currents can move unsuspecting swimmers offshore rapidly and represent a significant risk to beach users worldwide, including along the northern coast of Prince Edward Island (PEI), Canada. Although many rip currents are ephemeral and/or spatially variable in response to changes in the nearshore bar morphology and wave and tidal forcing, it is possible for rip channels to be geologically contr
Authors
Phillipe Alan Wernette, Chris Houser
A survey of storm-induced seaward-transport features observed during the 2019 and 2020 hurricane seasons
Hurricanes are known to play a critical role in reshaping coastlines, but often only impacts on the open ocean coast are considered, ignoring seaward-directed forces and responses. The identification of subaerial evidence for storm-induced seaward transport is a critical step towards understanding its impact on coastal resiliency. The visual features, found in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Authors
Jin-Si R. Over, Jenna A. Brown, Christopher R. Sherwood, Christie Hegermiller, Phillipe Alan Wernette, Andrew C. Ritchie, Jonathan Warrick
Wave-driven flood-forecasting on reef-lined coasts early warning system (WaveFoRCE)
Increasing the resilience of coastal communities while decreasing the risk to them are key to the continued inhabitance and sustainability of these areas. Low-lying coral reef-lined islands are experiencing storm wave-driven flood events that currently strike with little to no warning. These events are occurring more frequently and with increasing severity. There is a need along the world’s coral
Authors
William Skirving, Curt Storlazzi, Emily A Smail
Rapid observations of ocean dynamics and stratification along a steep island coast during Hurricane María
Hurricanes are extreme storms that affect coastal communities, but the linkages between hurricane forcing and ocean dynamics remain poorly understood. Here, we present full water column observations at unprecedented resolution from the southwest Puerto Rico insular shelf and slope during Hurricane María, representing a rare set of high-frequency, subsurface, oceanographic observations collected al
Authors
Olivia Cheriton, Curt Storlazzi, Kurt J. Rosenberger, Clark E Sherman, Wilford Schmidt
Coral reef restorations can be optimized to reduce coastal flooding hazards
Coral reefs are effective natural coastal flood barriers that protect adjacent communities. Coral degradation compromises the coastal protection value of reefs while also reducing their other ecosystem services, making them a target for restoration. Here we provide a physics-based evaluation of how coral restoration can reduce coastal flooding for various types of reefs. Wave-driven flooding reduc
Authors
Floortje Roelvink, Curt Storlazzi, Ap van Dongeren, Stuart Pearson
A maximum rupture model for the central and southern Cascadia subduction zone—reassessing ages for coastal evidence of megathrust earthquakes and tsunamis
A new history of great earthquakes (and their tsunamis) for the central and southern Cascadia subduction zone shows more frequent (17 in the past 6700 yr) megathrust ruptures than previous coastal chronologies. The history is based on along-strike correlations of Bayesian age models derived from evaluation of 554 radiocarbon ages that date earthquake evidence at 14 coastal sites. We reconstruct a
Authors
Alan Nelson, Christopher DuRoss, Robert C. Witter, Harvey M. Kelsey, Simon E. Engelhart, Shannon A. Mahan, Harrison J. Gray, Andrea D. Hawkes, Benjamin P. Horton, Jason S. Padgett
Changes in seabed mining
Chapter 23 of the First World Ocean Assessment (WOA I) focused on marine mining, and particularly on established extractive industries, which are predominantly confined to near-shore areas, where shallow-water, near-shore aggregate and placer deposits, and somewhat deeper water phosphate deposits are found (United Nations, 2017a). At the time of publication, there were no commercially developed de
Authors
James R. Hein, Pedro Madureira, Maria João Bebianno, Ana Colaço, Luis M. Pinheiro, Richard Roth, Pradeep K. Singh, Anastasia Strati, Joshua T. Tuhumwire