Images

Injecting ¹³C enriched carbon into soil incubations to quantify organo-mineral association of dead microbes with soil minerals.

Multicores collected from the northern Gulf of Mexico. These cores contain roughly 1 meter of sediment from the seafloor, and represent the past ~2000 years of deposition.

This image shows the perimeter of Rainbow Glacier in Glacier National Park: 1966, 1998, 2005, 2015. 

Crews perform repairs on the Sperry Weather Station as part of Fire Operations in Glacier National Park. Information gathered by the USGS managed Sperry Weather Station are being used by regional fire managers to forecast fire weather and future fire behavior during the 2017 fire season. 

Panoramic image from Sperry Glacier in Glacier National Park showing smoke from forest fires. Information gathered by the USGS managed Sperry Weather Station are being used by regional fire managers to forecast fire weather and future fire behavior.

USGS scientist Erich Peitzsch does repair on the Sperry Weather Station in Glacier National Park. Information gathered by the USGS managed Sperry Weather Station are being used by regional fire managers to forecast fire weather and future fire behavior during the 2017 fire season. 

A researcher locates an ablation stake near a crevasse on Wolverine Glacier.  These collapsible poles are used to measure snow and ice melt on the glacier surface.  

Sampling a marine terrace within the Mattole River soil chronosequence to quantify the impact of simulating soil drying and re-wetting on the release of greenhouse gases.

Sampling permafrost sidewalls of the Vault Tunnel, Alaska, for microbial DNA studies.

USGS scientists Miriam Jones and Kristen Manies working to obtain one of the peat cores they used to determine carbon content, age, and variations in plant remains with depth. They are standing in a bog created when permafrost thawed.

Lemon Creek Glacier is located at the southernmost tip of the Juneau Icefield in Southeast Alaska, USA, approximately 6.5 km northeast of the city of Juneau.

USGS scientist, Chris McNeil, collects data at an ablation stake on Wolverine Glacier near the end of the glacial melt season.

Researchers retrieving ice cores from an ice patch located on the Beartooth Plateau, Wyoming.

Heavily crevassed glacial ice flows across scoured rock in late summer at Gulkana Glacier, AK. 

Heavily crevassed terminus of Gulkana Glacier, AK, near the end of the 2016 ablation (melt) season.

Gulkana Glacier is located along the south flank of the eastern Alaska Range. 

Aerial photo of Sperry Glacier, Digital Globe image taken 08/26/2016. Aerial imagery, like this photo of Sperry Glacier, is used to create digital elevation models (DEMs) used to extrapolate mass balance field measurements over the entire glacier.

A scientist dumps DNA tracer into a moulin on Wolverine Glacier to assess water flow through the glacier as part of research aimed at understanding glacier processes.

Photo shows the fossil-rich sediments of the mid-Piacenzian warm period (MPWP) that document the rapid warming and sea level rise between about 3.30 and 3.25 million years agao. The hammer is at the conformable boundary between the Rushmere (below) and Morgarts Beach (above) Members of the Yorktown Formation. 

Measuring a snow core. The layers that make up snow cores are measured to determine the density of the snow and ice.

Examples of the diversity of shells from Arctic ostracode species. There are more than 100 different species living in the Arctic Ocean. From Gemery et al., 2015, An Arctic and Subarctic ostracode database: biogeographic and paleoceanographic applications. Hydrobiologia. DOI 10.1007/s10750-015-2587-4. Images captured by Laura Gemery, USGS.