Images

'Fisheye' photograph of the oceanside area of Fire Island showing dunes, surf, and beach, with 2 researchers beside an all-terrain vehicle

Eroded dunes on Fire Island, New York, nearly two years after Hurricane Sandy.

A crew of USGS scientists prepares equipment, including personal watercraft, to collect nearshore bathymetry and sub-surface geology data to assess the impacts of Hurricane Sandy.

Following Hurricane Sandy, estuarine surface samples were collected to assess foraminiferal microfossil distribution in the estuary and for comparison with marsh cores to aid in identification of storm deposits and estuarine influences on the marsh. We spotted a few horseshoe crabs while sampling but this was certainly one of the largest.

Following Hurricane Sandy, GPR field work was conducted on Assateague Island, Maryland, to image stratigraphic features that may aid in explaining controls on washover deposition. The horseshoe crab was spotted early in the morning while gearing up for the day.  

Katie Krueger, a summer intern at the USGS St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center in St. Petersburg, Florida, uses an optical microscope to pick out foraminifera from Arctic Ocean sediment samples.

Summer intern Katie Krueger (center) and her USGS supervisors: research oceanographer Lisa Robbins (left) and research geologist Jennifer Miselis. Because of her stellar academics and volleyball skills, Krueger was notified of her acceptance to Virginia Tech early in her junior year.

Multicores collected from the northern Gulf of Mexico while aboard the R/V Pelican in 2013. These cores are sampled at 5 mm increments and used to reconstruct sea surface temperature in the Gulf of Mexico over the past 1000 years.

An x-radiograph (top) and photograph (bottom) of an Orbicella faveolata specimen collected from Dry Tortugas National Park in 2008. Note the annual banding couplets of high-and-low density bands. Figure modified from Flannery and Poore, 2013.

A colony of the reef-building, massive starlet coral, Siderastrea siderea.

SCUBA diver working on a calcification station at Fowey Rocks, Biscayne National Park, Florida.

A wall of Desmophyllum dianthus cup corals with bonus octopus neighbor.

Photo of the seafloor in Block Island Sound showing a rock crab and several shrimp on a boulder that is covered with bryozoans. The photo was collected in support of research and management activities (e.g., wind farms and fisheries) along the Rhode Island inner continental shelf.

USGS diver taking a core of a 100-year-old coral to allow reconstruction of past ocean temperatures in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands.

Assessing how storms move sediment during storms provides coastal scientists and managers the information they need to keep coastal communities safe and prosperous. And, lucky for us, provides many opportunities to see great coastal sunsets!

Hurricane Sandy moved a house from barrier island to estuary, in this case into Barnegat Bay, NJ. Waves from extreme storms do the same with barrier island sediment.

Debris from Hurricane Sandy (Seaside Heights, NJ) is piled up behind an artificial dune in order to protect island infrastructure from the subsequent winter storm season. Like storms, humans change coasts too.

USGS Graduate Research Assistant Legna Torres-Garcia installs a temperature logger on a coral reef in Dry Tortugas National Park. She and her team deployed a vertical array with temperature loggers every 1m from the seabed to near-surface with the goal to capture any changes in temperature through time and across depth.

Large Lophelia colonies and numerous anemones at a depth of about 1,500 feet in Mississippi Canyon. Red laser beams, projected from a remotely operated vehicle, represent a separation of 10 centimeters (about 4 inches). A western roughy is seen to the left of the structure.

Black tape is stretched across the stopper of the 'Niskin' bottle and secured to form a positive pressure seal.

Aerial images of the wilderness breach: a) Aerial photograph taken several days after Hurricane Sandy (photo credit: NOAA); b) Aerial mosaic of the breach in June 2015 showing the location of erosion on the ocean side of the breach and deposition that results in the seasonal formation of a spit.