Images

Northern Leopard frog (Lithobates pipiens) in a wetland in Worth County, Iowa. Scientists tracked 72 northern leopard frogs in two wetlands in an agricultural setting in Iowa for insights into where and when individual adult frogs are likely exposed to pesticides.

Bio-Uptake Research Laboratory — Menlo Park, California. Experimental laboratory setup to study uranium uptake by aquatic organisms.

Image of the Chickasha  wastewater treatment plant taken as part of a study to understand the runoff of contaminants in wastewater applied to an agricultural field.

USGS scientist lifting a grab sample from ice hole on a stream in North Dakota. The scientist is part of a science team that assessing the potential impacts of a brine spill from unconventional oil and gas activities (UOG) on environmental health.

A U.S. Geological Survey employee sampling water through ice in Blacktail Creek, Williston Basin, North Dakota.

The USGS Mobile Atmospheric Mercury Laboratory has onboard instrumentation to measure aerosol concentrations and to continuously monitor mercury speciation and concentrations, air quality, automated wet deposition collection, and meteorological conditions.

Latham River at Jekyll Island State Park, Georgia, where the river flows into Jekyll Sound. The health of the Jekyll Sound ecosystem is influenced by streamflow and the associated nutrient loads.

Contact with intact forest ecosystems can lead to cutaneous leishmaniasis, also known as "chiclero's ulcer" (inset). Inset image Copyright 1997, 2004 by Current Medicine LLC. All rights reserved. Image reproduced here with kind permission from Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

Treated wastewater from Joint Base Cape Cod was discharged to rapid-infiltration disposal beds from 1936 to 1995. The disposal formed a groundwater contamination plume that extends more than 10 kilometers in the Cape Cod sand and gravel glacial outwash aquifer.

Glyphosate is frequently applied to corn and soybeans growing areas like these in Iowa.

USGS scientists collected water samples for a study of neuroactive pharmaceuticals in Minnesota Rivers using specialized techniques to insure the samples were not contaminated.

Discriminating Mercury Sources Using Mercury Isotopes

Sediment core retrieval from Lake Erie onboard the RV Lake Guardian on Lake Erie, Michigan.

A simplified diagram of the Sea Star Wasting Disease experiment devised at Cornell University, used to prove that a virus-sized, biologically active entity was triggering wasting symptoms in sea stars.

Dr. Michael T. Meyer in the laboratory working with a ultrapressure liquid chromatograph/tandem mass spectrometer. 

Eight of 22 major aquifer networks showed increases in concentrations of deethylatrazine, a degradation product of the herbicide atrazine.

The HBSL database contains 777 contaminants currently or historically analyzed by the NAWQA Program. The database includes MCLs, HHBPs, or HBSLs for 351 contaminants. HBSLs are not available for the remaining 426 contaminants because of a lack of toxicity information.

Although the visual picture of mixing zones at stream confluences appears straightforward, such as this one at the confluence of Cement Creek and the Animas River in Colorado, the chemical reactions that occur make them extremely complex from a water-quality perspective.

Vegetation grows on an east-facing cliff along Bull Run near Sudley Springs in Manassas National Battlefield Park, Virginia. The cliffs are islands of specialized habitat; they support plant species found nowhere else in the park, including locally uncommon or rare species.

East-facing cliff approximately 30 meters downstream from Farm Ford along Bull Run in Manassas National Battlefield Park, Virginia.

Microscopic photograph of the cyanobacteria Dolichospermum circinale cells in curved filaments. This photograph is typical of the photographs in the field and laboratory guide to help identify cyanobacteria under microscopes. Figure 40 from USGSOpen-File Report 2015–1164.