Images

Pilot Bob Van Wagenen and the Cessna 182R he flies when taking air photos for the USGS Remote Sensing Coastal Change Project.

Big Sur coast. Red squares mark some of the sites damaged by 2016–17 winter storms, including Mud Creek and Paul’s Slide areas.

Graphic showing geophysical and sampling systems used to define the seafloor topography, surface sediments, and underlying geology.

CoSMoS’s approach to projecting flood hazards: global winds, waves, tides, and anomalous water levels are scaled down to the local scale for  projecting nearshore wave heights, flooding, and shoreline change, including beach erosion and cliff failures.

Learn more at usgs.gov/cosmos

Photograph of Carmel River near the Sleepy Hollow reach. San Clemente Dam was built on Carmel River in 1921 to supply water locally. After being declared seismically unfit, plans to remove the dam began. It was completely removed in 2015.

Our Coast, Our Future web viewer showing an example of flood projections for the Russian River.

Example of CoSMoS projection displayed in the Our Coast, Our Future (OCOF) online tool.

Example of CoSMoS projected flooding extents for a 1.5 meter sea level rise in combination with possible 100 year return period coastal storms.

USGS ocean engineers Peter Dal Ferro and Gerry Hatcher, from the Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center in Santa Cruz, California, deploying a multicorer to sample the seafloor near an Atlantic margin methane seep site.

Fieldtrip participants at the former San Clemente Dam site.

Views of Madeira Beach, Florida, produced from a 17-minute video shot on June 20, 2017. Left: Snapshot, or first frame of video. Right: Time-averaged image, sometimes called a “timex,” created by averaging the intensity of light recorded at each spot, or “pixel,” during the 17-minute video.

“Variance” images derived from the same videos used in the studies. Left, Madeira Beach; right, Cowells Beach. In a variance image, the more variation in light intensity at a given pixel, the brighter the value assigned to that pixel. Bright areas indicate many changes in light intensity, caused by a lot of movement.

Close-up views of the toe of the Mud Creek landslide created from air photos taken May 27 (top), June 13 (middle), and June 26 (bottom). Caltrans built roads on top of the slide for assessment and monitoring activities.

Gerry Hatcher with the system he designed to record the precise time and geographic location of each air photo Van Wagenen shoots.

Paul’s Slide. Left: Air photo taken May 27, 2017, one of many that Beth Haddon will analyze with structure-from-motion software to measure changes in ground elevation. Right: Caltrans employees and contractors use an excavator and bulldozer to remove Paul’s Slide debris from California State Highway 1.

Tracklines along which R/V Ocean Starr (2017, red lines) and R/V Norseman (2016, black lines) conducted seismic-reflection surveys, overlaid on high-resolution bathymetry (color background). Yellow stars represent earthquakes of magnitude (M) 7 and greater since 1900.

A look into the USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center’s Marine Minerals Laboratory Suite.

A look into the USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center’s Marine Minerals Laboratory Suite.

Photo shows results of wave-driven flooding and overwash on Roi-Namur Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands.

Diagram of different ocean features that contribute to coastal flooding.

Exposed bedrock on the beach, below the University of California, Santa Barbara