Publications

Permafrost degradation is rapidly increasing in response to a warming Arctic climate, altering landscapes and damaging critical infrastructure. Solutions for monitoring permafrost thaw dynamics are essential to understand biogeochemical feedbacks as well as to issue warnings for hazardous geotechnical conditions. We investigate the feasibility of permafrost monitoring using permanently...

An airborne electromagnetic survey west of the Poso Creek oil field, located in the southeastern San Joaquin Valley, California, was flown in October 2016 to improve understanding of the hydrogeologic setting and the distribution of groundwater salinity in the area. The airborne electromagnetic data were used to develop resistivity models of the subsurface, where the mean depth of...

Bedrock property quantification is critical for predicting the hydrological response of watersheds to climate disturbances. Estimating bedrock hydraulic properties over watershed scales is inherently difficult, particularly in fracture-dominated regions. Our analysis tests the covariability of above- and belowground features on a watershed scale, by linking borehole geophysical data...

No abstract available.

Over the past ~30 years, hyperspectral remote sensing of chemical variations in white mica have proven to be useful for ore deposit studies in a range of deposit types. To better understand mineral deposits and to guide spectrometer design, this contribution reviews relevant papers from the fields of remote sensing, spectroscopy, and geology that have utilized spectral changes caused by...

The western North American Great Basin's Carlin-type deposits represent the largest accumulation of gold in the Northern Hemisphere. The controversy over their origins echoes the debate between Neptunists and Plutonists at the birth of modern geology: were the causative processes meteoric or magmatic? Sulfur isotopes have long been considered key to decoding metal cycling in the Earth's...

The nature of Yellowstone National Park’s plumbing system linking deep thermal fluids to its legendary thermal features is virtually unknown. The prevailing concepts of Yellowstone hydrology and chemistry are that fluids reside in reservoirs with unknown geometries, flow laterally from distal sources and emerge at the edges of lava flows. Here we present a high-resolution synoptic view...

Detrital zircon U-Pb studies of mudstone provenance are rare but may preferentially fingerprint distal zircon sources. To examine this issue, Pierre Shale and Trinidad Sandstone deposited in a Late Cretaceous deltaic environment in the Raton Basin, Colorado (USA), were measured for detrital zircon U-Pb age by laser ablation–inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry. Two major detrital...

The moment magnitude (⁠Mw�w⁠) ∼7 earthquake that struck Charleston, South Carolina, on 31 August 1886 is the largest historical earthquake in the United States east of the Appalachian Mountains. The fault(s) that ruptured during this earthquake has never been conclusively identified, and conflicting fault models have been proposed. Here we interpret reprocessed seismic reflection...

The Alto Guaporé gold province, southwestern Amazon craton, contains gold deposits that have been mined since the beginning of the 18th century and these deposits, together, have modern-day, pre-mining gold resources of at least 1.8 Moz. The ore is associated with quartz vein systems along the southeastern part of the Aguapei belt, a ~35-km-wide and ~500-km-long, NNW-trending shear zone...

The National Energy Technology Laboratory, the Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation, and the U.S. Geological Survey are leading an effort to conduct an extended gas hydrate production test in northern Alaska. The proposed production test required the drilling of an initial stratigraphic test well (STW) to confirm the geologic conditions of the proposed test site. This well was...

The Coles Hill uranium deposit with an indicated resource of about 130 million lbs. of U3O8 is the largest unmined uranium deposit in the United States. The deposit is hosted in the Taconian (approximately 480 – 450 Ma) Martinsville igneous complex, which consists of the Ordovician Leatherwood Granite (granodiorite) and Silurian Rich Acres Formation (diorite). The host rock was...