Images

In the aftermath of the 2018 Carr Fire, northern California, sediment has eroded from burned hillslopes and accumulated in some areas of Whiskeytown Lake. A recent sediment deposit is shown here in the Whiskey Creek section of the lake.

On March 25th, 2019, ocean engineer Rob Wyland of the Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center gave a tour and demonstration to roughly a dozen students from the engineering class he teaches at Cabrillo College, a local community college.

The boomer plate produces a repeatable pulse in the 1-6kHz frequency range using an electrodynamic transducer that can be powered by a capacitor discharge system.

USGS photographs taken from a contracted small airplane are used to build three-dimensional representations of the hillslopes of Big Sur, California, as shown here for the Mud Creek landslide site in 2017.  Blue symbols show the locations of individual photos obtained on the flight, and the gray area shows the hillslope landscape created from the photos using S

Computer images showing the coastal cliff area of Mud Creek on the Big Sur coastline, central California, where on May 20, 2017 a catastrophic landslide destroyed over 400 meters of scenic California State Highway 1. These illustrations show the changes to the digital surface models of Mud Creek during the three primary phases of the landslide: (

Aerial photographs were collected from a small, fixed-wing aircraft over the coast of Barter Island, Alaska on July 01 2014, September 07 2014. Precise aircraft position information and structure-from-motion photogrammetric methods were combined to derive a high-resolution orthophotomosaic.

Map of locations of instrument moorings where we collected time-series oceanographic data from the Monterey Canyon, offshore of Montery, California, from October 2015 - March 2017

Photo of the Salton Sea

Maps show eelgrass distribution (left) along the tracklines followed by the boat (right).

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.

Reefs provide protection from waves and wave-driven flooding. A snapshot from the simulation of wave-driven flooding and island overwash for an annual storm at the Republic of the Marshall Islands is shown.

Screenshot of Our Coast, Our Future (OCOF) interactive map view of Stinson Beach, California, showing extent of flooding predicted if subjected to a sea-level rise of 100 centimeters (about 40 inches) and elevated water levels caused by a 100-year storm.

View of Barry Glacier in Alaska, from Prince William Sound

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.

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.

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.

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.