Images

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Photograph of Pingok Island, Alaska, reveals physical features of a changing Arctic: collapsing bluffs, salt-killed tundra (lighter brown near the bluff edge), and drained thermokarst lakes (rust-colored depressions).

An oblique aerial photograph shows the currently active Long Range Radar Site on Barter Island, formerly a DEW Line (Distant Early Warning) station that was deactivated in 1990. The Cold War-era landfill in the foreground of the photograph was at immediate risk from coastal erosion in 2006 and has since been relocated farther inland.

This photograph shows the Arctic Coastal Plain of northern Alaska. Coastal erosion along the Arctic coast is chronic, widespread and potentially accelerating, posing threats to infrastructure important for defense and energy purposes, natural shoreline habitats and nearby Native communities.

Photograph of barrier islands near the western terminus of Icy Reef located on the Beaufort Sea coast of Alaska, looking south. Egaksrak Lagoon separates the islands from the low-lying mainland coast of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Brooks Range in the background.

This photograph shows ice-wedge polygons and an eroding shoreline at Cape Halkett on the Beaufort Sea coast of Alaska. Coastal erosion along the Arctic coast is chronic, widespread, and potentially accelerating, posing threats to infrastructure important for defense and energy purposes, natural shoreline habitats, and nearby Native communities.

Coral atolls are normally long, thin bars of white sand that rise just a few meters above sea level. The island or island group surrounds a hollow center where a volcanic peak once was. The atoll shown in this photo-like satellite image is the island of Tureia, in French Polynesia, in the South Pacific Ocean.

Photo of Dinkey Creek in the southern Sierra Nevada, California, showing a small waterfall cascading down a bedrock slope.

Landsat image of Maui, Hawaiʻi, with the small island of Kahoʻolawe to its south.

Personal watercraft equipped with GPS and sonar (echo sounder) is used to collect detailed, nearshore bathymetry (depth) information.

USGS scientists Andrew Schwartz and Dan Hanes maneuver a current profiler for a study of surf-zone hydrodynamics at Ocean Beach, on the west side of San Francisco, California. Beach erosion has been a continuing problem in this area.

Large-scale poster describing USGS work.

Sonar-generated image showing underwater topography and the potential for landslides near the head of Resurrection Bay, Alaska. The terrain looks three times as steep as it occurs naturally. The arrow points to underwater landslide debris from the collapse of a fan-delta following the great Alaskan earthquake of 1964.

Large-scale poster describing USGS work.

The USGS, in cooperation with the Upper Yuba River Studies Program and the California Bay–Delta Authority (CALFED), studied Englebright Lake. Englebright Dam was built in 1941 to trap sediment washed downstream by hydraulic gold mining.