Images

Helicopter view of Canadian Coast Guard Ship Louis S. St. Laurent (top) and U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy (bottom) on the Arctic Ocean. This was during a scientific expedition to map the extended continental shelf in the Arctic Ocean.

USGS researcher Benjamin Jones examines a collapsed block of ice-rich permafrost on Barter Island along Alaska's Arctic coast.

Photograph of the seafloor off the California coast showing coarse sand, shells, and a sunflower sea star. It was taken during a "ground-truthing" survey off of Salt Point, California, in support of the California Seafloor Mapping Program.

Train tracks and overwater structures along Browns Bay in Edmonds, Washington often occur on developed shorelines of Puget Sound. The built environment can interrupt the flow of sediment from back-beach bluffs to the intertidal zone, attenuate and redirect alongshore currents, and reduce upper beach habitat.

Underwater photograph of Tumon Bay Marine Reserve, Guam, showing some of the amazing biologic diversity of coral reefs.

Underwater photo of a stressed coral mound in Tumon Bay Marine Preserve in Guam.

Photograph of the coastal region of Natural Bridges State Beach in Santa Cruz, California

The USGS, in cooperation with Santa Cruz County and the California Department of Boating and Waterways, studied the seacliffs, ocean floor, and waves of Pleasure Point, California.   We created detailed maps of the seacliffs and ocean floor using LIDAR laser scanners and sonar.

USGS scientists Patrick Barnard (left) and Jeff Hansen navigate personal watercraft equipped with GPS and echo sounders through the waters of San Francisco Bay. They are collecting bathymetric, or depth, information in order to create maps of the bottom of the Bay.

USGS researchers Patrick Barnard and Jeff Hansen surveying the bathymetry offshore of Crissy Field in San Francisco, California, on October 26, 2007. They are using the Coastal Profiling System—personal watercraft equipped with echo sounders and kinematic Global Positioning System (GPS) units. The Golden Gate Bridge is in the background.

USGS Ocean Engineer Gerry Hatcher walks along South Jetty Beach, south of Ventura Harbor in southern California, to record beach elevations using a handheld computer and mobile GPS equipment.

This photograph of the seafloor off the California coast also shows jellyfish in the water column. This photograph was collected as part of the California Seafloor and Coastal Mapping Program.

A kelp greenling fish swimming above a seafloor of mixed gravel, cobble and rock outcrop with scattered shell. Fish is approx. 20 cm (8 inches) long. Image acquired 1 km (0.62 miles) offshore Half Moon Bay, California at a depth of 14 meters (46 ft). Also in the image are encrusting sponges, red algae (seaweed), and orange cup corals.

Boulders and biota off San Gregorio, California, in water approximately 30 meters (100 feet) deep. Organisms include bat stars, small sea anemones, strawberry anemone, cup corals, and frilly sea cucumbers.

Eroding bluffs along Alaska’s Arctic coast. Note light permafrost in bluff face, below top few feet of soil and vegetation.

This nearly century-old whaling boat rests along the Beaufort Sea coast near Lonely, Alaska in July, 2007. The boat was washed away to sea just a few months later.

A multibeam bathymetric survey that produced unprecedented high resolution images of the mouth of San Francisco Bay was conducted in 2004 and 2005.

Apartments on the edge of a crumbling cliff in Pacifica, California. Rip-rap was added to the base of the cliff in hopes of delaying further cliff erosion.

Contour plots of SSC for the spatial surveys during trade-wind conditions on the reef flat. (a) SSC from the low tide survey. The highest SSC (60e70 mg/l) were located in a nearshore band, and east of the fish ponds and Kaunakakai wharf. (b) SSC from the high tide surveys.

A NOAA image of the bathymetry north of Puerto Rico. Two ancient submarine landslides are visible as head scarps (labeled Loiza and Arecibo Amphitheaters). Seafloor fissures are indicated by black arrows, and dashed lines outline debris flows from past failures. Map annotated by Uri ten Brink, USGS

Jeff Hansen on an all-terrain vehicle (ATV) at Ocean Beach, San Francisco, in 2006. The ATV is equipped with instrumentation which records beach topography.