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Publications

Scientific reports, journal articles, and information products produced by USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center scientists.

Filter Total Items: 1316

Global and regional sea level rise scenarios for the United States

This report and accompanying datasets from the U.S. Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flood Hazard Scenarios and Tools Interagency Task Force provide 1) sea level rise scenarios to 2150 by decade that include estimates of vertical land motion and 2) a set of extreme water level probabilities for various heights along the U.S. coastline. These data are available at 1-degree grids along the U.S. coastline
Authors
William Sweet, Ben Hamlington, Robert E. Kopp, Christopher Weaver, Patrick L. Barnard, David Bekaert, William Brooks, Michael Craghan, Gregory Dusek, Thomas Frederikse, Gregory Garner, Ayesha S. Genz, John P. Krasting, Eric Larour, Doug Marcy, John J. Marra, Jayantha Obeysekera, Mark Osler, Matthew Pendleton, Daniel Roman, Lauren Schmied, Will Veatch, Kathleen D. White, Casey Zuzak

Detrital zircon provenance of the Cretaceous-Neogene East Coast Basin reveals changing tectonic conditions and drainage reorganization along the Pacific margin of Zealandia

The Upper Cretaceous–Pliocene strata of New Zealand record ~100 m.y. of Zealandia’s evolution, including development of the Hikurangi convergent margin and Alpine transform plate boundary. A comprehensive, new detrital zircon U-Pb data set (8315 analyses from 61 samples) was generated along a ~700 km transect of the East Coast Basin of New Zealand. Age distributions were analyzed and interpreted i
Authors
Jared T. Gooley, Nora Maria Nieminski

Human-in-the-Loop segmentation of earth surface imagery

Segmentation, or the classification of pixels (grid cells) in imagery, is ubiquitously applied in the natural sciences. Manual methods are often prohibitively time-consuming, especially those images consisting of small objects and/or significant spatial heterogeneity of colors or textures. Labeling complicated regions of transition that in Earth surface imagery are represented by collections of mi
Authors
Daniel D. Buscombe, Evan B. Goldstein, Christopher R. Sherwood, Cameron S Bodine, Jenna A. Brown, Jaycee Favela, Sharon Fitzpatrick, Christine J. Kranenburg, Jin-Si R. Over, Andrew C. Ritchie, Jonathan Warrick, Phillipe Alan Wernette

Action plan for restoration of coral reef coastal protection services: Case study example and workbook

This report was prepared by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), Office of Research and Development, as part of the Air, Climate and Energy (ACE) research program, with support from Tetra Tech, Inc., and in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Geological Survey, and The Nature Conservancy. The ACE research program provides scientific informa
Authors
Catherine A. Courtney, Jordon M. West, Curt Storlazzi, T. Shay Viehman, Richard Czaplinski, Erin Hague, Elizabeth C. Shaver

Biology: Integrating core to essential variables (Bio-ICE) task team report for hard corals

The Interagency Ocean Observation Committee (IOOC) is chartered by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Subcommittee on Ocean Science and Technology (SOST). The purpose of the IOOC is to advise, assist, and make recommendations to the SOST on matters related to ocean observations via task teams such as the Biology - Integrating Core to Essential Variables (Bio-ICE) task t
Authors
E. K. Towle, Abigail Benson, Matt Biddle, Sarah Bingo, Kaitlyn Brucker, Gabrielle Canonico, Maggie Chory, Kruit Desai, Masha Edmondson, Miguel Figuerola, Christina Horstmann, Susan K Jackson, Jen Koss, J. Landrum, Kathryn Lohr, Laura Lorenzoni, Anderson Mayfield, Brian Melzin, Frank Muller-Karger, Sarah O'Conner, Deb Santavy, Curt Storlazzi, Anna Toline, Juan Torres-Perez, Kimberly K. Yates

Drivers, dynamics and impacts of changing Arctic coasts

Arctic coasts are vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including rising sea levels and the loss of permafrost, sea ice and glaciers. Assessing the influence of anthropogenic warming on Arctic coastal dynamics, however, is challenged by the limited availability of observational, oceanographic and environmental data. Yet, with the majority of permafrost coasts being erosive, coupled with pro
Authors
Anna M. Irrgang, Mette Bendixen, Louise M. Farquharson, Alisa V. Baranskaya, Li H. Erikson, Ann E. Gibbs, Stanislav A. Ogorodov, Pier Paul Overduin, Hugues Lantuit, Mikhail N. Grigoriev, Benjamin M. Jones

Gas hydrates on Alaskan marine margins

Gas hydrate distributions on the marine margins of the U.S. state of Alaska are more poorly known than those on other U.S. margins, where bottom simulating reflections have been systematically mapped on marine seismic data to support modern, quantitative assessments of gas-in-place in gas hydrates. The extent of bottom simulating reflections in the U.S. Beaufort Sea has been known since the late 1
Authors
Carolyn D. Ruppel, Patrick E. Hart

Estimates of metals contained in abyssal manganese nodules and ferromanganese crusts in the global ocean based on regional variations and genetic types of nodules

Deep-ocean ferromanganese crusts and manganese nodules are important marine repositories for global metals. Interest in these minerals as potential resources has led to detailed sampling in many regions of the global ocean, allowing for updated estimates of their global extent. Here, we present global estimates of total tonnage as well as contained metal concentrations and tonnages for ferromangan
Authors
Kira Mizell, James R. Hein, Manda Viola Au, Amy Gartman

Workshops report for mesophotic and deep benthic community fish, mobile invertebrates, sessile invertebrates and infauna

Two workshops with subject matter experts in the appropriate fields, were held in November and December 2021 to elicit guidance and feedback from the broader mesophotic and deep benthic scientific community. These workshops focused on best practices/approaches and identifying data gaps relative to habitat assessment and evaluation goals of the Mesophotic and Deep Benthic Community (MDBC) restorati
Authors
Rachel Bassett, Stacey L. Harter, Randy Clark, Ian Zink, Katherine Hornick, Jennifer Hartman, Hanna Bliska, Melissa Carle, Tracey Sutton, Amanda Demopoulos, Andy David, Kristopher Benson, Jill Bourque, Martha S. Nizinski, Nancy G. Prouty, Stephanie M. Sharuga, Alicia Caporaso, Jennifer Le, Jennifer Herting, Cheryl Morrison, Matthew Poti

Storm and tsunami overwash sediment transport inferred from recent deposits

Overwash deposits from storms and tsunamis record information about sediment transport and flow that can be used to inform hazard assessments. Here we explore deposits from two extreme wave events: (1) the 2012 Hurricane Sandy, a Category 5 hurricane that is the largest storm in the Atlantic basin on historical record, and (2) the 2011 Tohoku-oki tsunami, created by a 9.0 Mw earthquake, that was u
Authors
Bruce E. Jaffe, SeanPaul La Selle

Geochemical insights into formation of enigmatic ironstones from Rio Grande rise, South Atlantic Ocean

Rio Grande Rise (RGR) is an intraplate oceanic elevation in the South Atlantic Ocean that formed at a hotspot on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge during the Cretaceous. In spreading center and hotspot environments, ironstones form mainly by biomineralization of reduced Fe from hydrothermal fluids or oxidation of sulfide deposits. However, RGR has been considered aseismic and volcanically inactive for the pa
Authors
Mariana Benites, James R. Hein, Kira Mizell, Kenneth A. Farley, Jonathon Treffkorn, Luigi Jovane

Marine paleoseismic evidence for seismic and aseismic slip along the Hayward-Rodgers Creek fault system in northern San Pablo Bay

Distinguishing between seismic and aseismic fault slip in the geologic record is difficult, yet fundamental to estimating the seismic potential of faults and the likelihood of multi-fault ruptures. We integrated chirp sub-bottom imaging with targeted cross-fault coring and core analyses of sedimentary proxy data to characterize vertical deformation and slip behavior within an extensional fault ben
Authors
Janet Watt, Mary McGann, Renee K. Takesue, Thomas Lorenson