Conference Papers

Assessment of temporal trends in national ground-water quality networks are rarely published in scientific journals. This is partly due to the fact that long-term data from these types of networks are uncommon and because many national monitoring networks are not driven by hypotheses that can be easily incorporated into scientific research. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water-Quality

From the Landsat program's inception in 1972 to the present, the earth science user community has benefited from a historical record of remotely sensed data. The multispectral data from the Landsat 5 (L5) Thematic Mapper (TM) sensor provide the backbone for this extensive archive. Historically, the radiometric calibration procedure for this imagery used the instrument's response to the Internal Ca

[No abstract available]

We have used historical records of damaging landslides triggered by rainstorms, and a newly developed Probabilistic Landslide Assessment Cost Estimation System (PLACES), to estimate the numbers and direct costs of future landslides in the San Francisco Bay region. The estimated annual cost of future landslides in the entire region is about US $15 million (year 2000 $). The estimated annual cost is

Papers in this Special Feature stem from a symposium on large-scale ecosystem change and the conservation of marine mammals convened at the 86th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Mammalogists in June 2006. Major changes are occurring in multiple aspects of the marine environment at unprecedented rates, within the life spans of some individual marine mammals. Drivers of change include shift

[No abstract available]

The late Neogene section in the Salton Trough, California, and along the lower Colorado River in Arizona is composed of marine units bracketed by nonmarine units. Microfossils from the marine deposits indicate that a marine incursion inundated the Salton Trough during the late Miocene. Water depths increased rapidly in the Miocene and eventually flooded the region now occupied by the Colorado Rive

Where the lower Colorado River traverses the Basin and Range Province below the Grand Canyon, significant late Pleistocene aggradation and subsequent degrada tion of the river are indicated by luminescence, paleomagnetic, and U-series data and stratigraphy. Aggradational, finely bedded reddish mud, clay, and silt are underlain and overlain by cross-bedded to plane-bedded fine sand and silt. That s

The chronologic history of pluvial Owens Lake along the eastern Sierra Nevada in Owens Valley, California, has previously been reported for the interval of time from ca. 25 calibrated ka to the present. However, the age, distribution, and paleoclimatic context of higher-elevation shoreline features have not been formally documented. We describe the location and characteristics of wave-formed erosi

The utility of the multi‐channel analysis of surface waves (MASW) seismic method for non‐invasive assessment of earthen levees was evaluated for a section of the Citrus Lakefront Levee, New Orleans, Louisiana. This test was conducted after the New Orleans' area levee system had been stressed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The MASW data were acquired in a seismically noisy, urban environment using a

This article reports a study of modeled, long-period building responses to ground-motion simulations of earthquakes in the San Francisco Bay Area. The earthquakes include the 1989 magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake, a magnitude 7.8 simulation of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and two hypothetical magnitude 7.8 northern San Andreas fault earthquakes with hypocenters north and south of San Fra

Recent studies of the Chicago River have determined that gravity currents are responsible for persistent bidirectional flows that have been observed in the river. A gravity current is the flow of one fluid within another caused by a density difference between the fluids. These studies demonstrated how acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCP) can be used to detect and characterize gravity currents