Images

The coastal bluff along East Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz, California are especially vulnerable to rising sea level during big storms. Sometimes even the rip-rap, put in place to protect roadways and homes, cannot protect the bluffs from erosion.

View of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk amusement park in Santa Cruz, California. Photo was taken from the bluff on East Cliff Drive, east of the San Lorenzo River mouth. Sand on the beach gets eroded, redistributed, and deposited due to the dynamic conditions brought about by storms and changing river flow.

Waves flood across a coastal road near Santa Cruz, California.

On remote Barter Island, Alaska, Bruce Richmond (right) and Cordell Johnson drill into 500-foot-thick permafrost using a handheld drill with a 2-inch drill bit—a challenging task! It can take 3 hours to drill nearly 20 feet down.

Pamela Swarzenski from the USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center sampling gas released by gas hydrate breakdown during a quantitative degassing aboard the drilling vessel Chikyu during the Indian Government’s National Gas Hydrates Program (NGHP-02) drilling expedition offshore from eastern India.

Flood maps from Our Coast, Our Future showing Stinson Beach today (slide 1); with a 50-centimeter sea-level rise (slide 2); and when an annual storm strikes in addition to 50-centimeter sea-level rise (slide 3). Green patches are low-lying areas prone to flooding.

Science crew aboard R/V Marcus G. Langseth. Ray Sliter (Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center) and Deb Hutchison (Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center) shown at far left.

Study region along the Queen Charlotte-Fairweather fault offshore southeastern Alaska. Rectangles show locations of the two USGS-led marine geophysical surveys in May and August 2015. The third cruise was offshore Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, and southern Alaska in September 2015.

Enlarged from previous figure, this map shows a string of basins along the fault and offset of the south wall of the Yakobi Sea Valley. Line A–B marks the location of multichannel seismic-reflection profile.

Multichannel seismic-reflection profile showing sediment layers beneath the seafloor disrupted by the Queen Charlotte-Fairweather fault near Cross Sound. The profile is approximately 16 kilometers across, and it extends approximately 370 meters beneath the seafloor. See related multimedia below, for the location of this profile.

Profile of newly discovered volcano-like cone in sonar record collected off southern Alaska. The cone’s summit is at about 1,000 meters water depth. Note fluid plume (blue) rising more than 700 meters upward from the summit.

The relatively new camera stations at Santa Cruz and Madeira Beach have not yet imaged many rip channels, so this is an example from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Field Research Facility in Duck, North Carolina. In this time-averaged image from video taken September 1, 2015, the dark horizontal bands perpendicular to the beach indicate rip channels.

Left: USGS research hydrologist Mark Reid (left) and USGS research geologist Kevin Schmidt collect GPS data along the Big Sur coast on September 19, 2007. Photo credit: Maiana Hanshaw, USGS (now with swisstopo).

Enlarged map of the Yakobi Sea Valley. Closeup view (upper right) shows right-lateral offset of the Yakobi Sea Valley wall by the Queen Charlotte-Fairweather fault. MCS, multichannel seismic; km, kilometers. For location, see the southeastern Alaska trackline map.

Engineering technician Tim Elfers of the USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center navigates a personal watercraft (PWC) through waves offshore of central California. The PWC is equipped with sonar and GPS in order to map the nearshore seafloor.

Geology and geomorphology offshore of Fort Ross, California, showing location of the San Andreas Fault and slope failures in the fault zone.

Santa Barbara Channel region, showing locations of six California Seafloor Mapping Program (CSMP) map sets (red rectangles) and the outer boundary of California’s State Waters (yellow line).

Gray-scale perspective view of Rincon Point, the subaerial part of a delta formed by boulders deposited at the mouth of Rincon Creek. A relict submerged boulder delta, formed by similar processes during lower stands of sea level, extends 1,500 meters offshore. Relief on this submerged delta causes wave refraction and a world-class surfbreak (inset image).

USGS Ocean Engineer Gerry Hatcher (left) monitors the view of the seafloor from the camera mounted on the Mini Muc and communicates with the ship’s bridge while USGS engineering technician Pete Dal Ferro uses a remote winch control to position the Mini Muc and trigger coring.

A personal watercraft ready to survey the surf zone, with custom waterproof displays linked to an echo sounder and a precision GPS receiver. These surveys require special training and permits.

Cliff erosion is a common storm-induced hazard along the West Coast. Two condemned apartment buildings along Esplanade Avenue in Pacifica, California are shown here before their demolition in 2016 and 2017.