Images

View looking eastward from the northern Funeral Mountains (California, USA), where early Cenozoic sedimentary strata are unconformably overlain by middle Miocene volcaniclastic deposits. 

Detail of tree-ring cross-section from southern Colorado. This photo, and others like it, are published in the USGS Data Release "Preserving Tree-Ring Datasets for Climate and Hazard Research and Understanding Societal Impacts: Colorado Fire, Climate, Humans".

The YellowScan Navigator Bathymetric Lidar Scanner awaits preflight checks near the South Platte River, Denver, CO.

In January 2024, Joe Adams of the USGS National Uncrewed Systems Office led an A-454 aviation training course at the Denver Federal Center in Lakewood, Colorado.

Geologist Michael Frothingham observes strongly deformed rocks of a Proterozoic shear zone in the Medicine Bow Mountains (Wyoming, USA).

View to the west across Death Valley (California, USA) to the Panamint Mountains. Alluvial fans (foreground) and the salt lake playa of the Badwater basin (middle ground) occupy the basin floor.

Photomigrograph (cross-polarized light) showing branching bunches of calcite filaments grown from algal mats in spring-discharge tufas of Cold Creek Spring (Las Vegas region, Nevada, USA). 

Vivid red, orange, and yellow colors highlight hydrothermally altered rocks on East Red Mountain in the Grizzly Peak caldera (Sawatch Range, Colorado, USA).

Intermountain West Project members discuss an outcrop of the Oligocene-Miocene Troublesome Formation (near Kremmling, Colorado, USA).

Research Geologist Theresa Schwartz walks over Cenozoic sedimentary rocks in Death Valley National Park (California, USA).

Research Geologist Marieke Dechesne investigates heavy mineral-bearing shoreface deposits in the Upper Cretaceous Trinidad Sandstone (Raton Basin, New Mexico, USA).

Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia) grow on middle Cenozoic sedimentary rocks of the Las Vegas region (southern Nevada, USA).  

Intermountain West Project members Adam Hudson and Michael Frothingham inspect young aeolian deposits of the San Juan River corridor (Bluff, Utah, USA). 

A view westward from Cottonwood Pass (Sawatch Range, Colorado, USA) into the Taylor Park basin. The peaks in the backgorund are composed of igneous and metamorphic rocks ranging in age from early Paleozoic to Eocene, uplifted along the Taylor Park fault.

Research Geologist Jens-Erik Lundstern explores multi-colored lacustrine shales of the Oligocene Amargosa Valley Formation (Bat Mountain, California, USA). 

Research Geologist Jens-Erik Lundstern poses as a scale for middle Cenozoic fluvial conglomerates in the Delamar Mountains (southern Nevada, USA). 

Intermountain West Project members pose at the summit of Crested Butte (Colorado, USA) prior to examining the Crested Butte laccolith (from left to right, Jeremy Workman, Allison Dombrowski, Ian Hillenbrand, Amy Gilmer, Kenzie Turner, and Ren Thompson). 

Red sedimentary rocks of the Pennsylvanian-Permian Maroon Formation exposed on Avery Peak dip southwestward away from gray igneous rocks of the Cenozoic White Rock pluton.

Intermountain West Project members Theresa Schwartz and Alexander Lusk investigate the Pennsylvanian Honaker Trail Formation at Goosenecks State Park (Utah, USA). 

Geologist Alexander Lusk investigates slickenlines on the Moab fault near Arches National Park (Utah, USA).

Wild burros stand guard on the path to Miocene volcaniclastic rocks of the Death Valley region (California, USA).