Images

View of Barry Glacier in Alaska, from Prince William Sound

Coastal wetland ecosystems in Jamaica Bay, New York, provide important ecosystem services along the highly urbanized Atlantic coast.

Shaded-relief map of central California showing location of the Big Sur area (white dashed line). Red line shows the San Gregorio-Hosgri fault (SGHF) and the Big Sur Bend between Point Sur (PS) and Piedras Blancas (PB). Black lines show other faults.

Perspective view of part of the Big Sur Bend in the San Gregorio-Hosgri fault. The steep slope beside the fault results from uplift along the fault, which is part of the strike-slip fault system that forms the boundary in California between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates.

Contractor Babak Tehranirad works on an operational model for forecasting flooding around San Francisco Bay.

Left to right: USGS scientist Josh Logan, USGS contractor Babak Tehranirad, and USGS contractor Rae Taylor-Burns (University of California-Santa Cruz graduate student) collect beach elevation data near Moss Landing, California, with precision GPS units carried in their backpacks.

Babak Tehranirad holds a lobster that he caught while on vacation in March 2017.

The USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center's (PCMSC) small utility boat named Fast Eddy, shown here on the Mokelumne River in northern California.

Topography and bathymetry of southern Cascadia, which includes southern Oregon and northern California (seafloor depths between 200 and 3000 m are shown in the spectrum color scale from red (shallower) to purple (deeper). The land and continental shelf are shown in grayscale slope shading where darker colors represent steeper slopes.

Top row, left to right: Cordell Johnson (left) and Evan Dailey use the USGS R/V Fast Eddy to collect water samples. Cordell Johnson (left) and Jessie Lacy prepare to deploy a tripod holding instruments to measure water level, currents, and suspended sediment.

Two divers work to collect a long core sample from a coral reef in Florida.

Mineral-laden water emerging from a hydrothermal vent on the Niua underwater volcano in the Lau Basin, southwest Pacific Ocean. As the water cools, minerals precipitate to form tower-like “chimneys.” Image taken during 2016 cruise “Virtual Vents.”  

USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center in Santa Cruz, California installed these two video cameras, pointed at the shoreline. The cameras collected imagery every half hour for 10 minutes, during daylight hours. The images are stored in the cloud and are used to study coastal variations through time, like wave, shoreline, and sandbar dynamics.

USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center's research vessel R/V San Lorenzo.

Sun sets on Whiskeytown Lake with PCMSC's vessel San Lorenzo in foreground.

The SWATHplus is a 234 kHz interferometric bathymetric survey tool for surveys in water depths from 1 to 200 meters.

Looking through the windshield of USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center's boat San Lorenzo under pristine field conditions.

Snapshot of Isla Verde in San Juan, Puerto Rico, from a coastal video monitoring station

Snapshot of Isla Verde in San Juan, Puerto Rico, from a coastal video monitoring station

Time-exposure image of Isla Verde in San Juan, Puerto Rico, from a coastal video monitoring station. Image is time-averaged over 10 minutes of video.

Bright image of Isla Verde in San Juan, Puerto Rico, from a coastal video monitoring station. Image is compiled from 10 minutes of video and tracks the brightest pixels through 10 minutes of motion.