Images

The airgun sled is painted orange and suspended from the A-frame.  The three airguns are suspended beneath the sled. The multichannel digital streamer (yellow cable going into the water from the sled) is towed from the the weighted sled to keep it under the ice. This photo shows the number of crew required to safely deploy the airgun sled.

USCG Healy is circling to pass CCGS Louis in order to break her free from the ice.  The joint field program utilized two icebreakers so that the seismic vessel, with gear in the water behind the ship, could be broken free when the ice prevented her forward progress.

CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent following the path created by USCGC Healy

A breach in the coastline of Rodanthe, North Carolina, caused by Hurricane Irene in 2011. Repeated storm impacts, combined with sea level rise, make the development and improvement of models that help forecast coastal change very important to planners working to build more resilient communities

Fog is common near open-water leads in the Arctic Ocean, and leaves ice everywhere aboard the ship.  A clear blue sky is a bright background to show the thick ice left after the fog lifted.

Electronics for controlling the moving arm in the open pressure housing.

U.S. Geological Survey scientist collecting elevation data on the bluff of Alaska’s north coast.

Eider duck eggs in a nest on Arey Island, Alaska. 

The large white radar dome is a former Distant Early Warning Line site, which sits atop a permafrost bluff on Barter Island, Alaska.

Water molecules (1 red oxygen and 2 white hydrogens) form a pentagonal dodecahedron around a methane molecule (1 gray carbon and 4 green hydrogens). This represents 2 of the 8 parts of the typical Structure I gas hydrate molecule.

Map of the Northeastern Caribbean: topography is in shades of green and bathymetry in shades of blue. Fault traces are shown as lines with the following descriptions: barbed=thrust fault; solid=strike-slip fault with arrows showing relative direction of motion; black and white=normal fault. Faults outlined in red have a potential to generate a large earthquake.

Location of earthquakes as a function of depth and size in the northeastern Caribbean.

Comparison of observed near-bed velocities and modeled near-bed velocities using several bottom-roughness formulations. Velocity vectors are overlaid on map of backscatter from the sea floor showing regions with coarse sand (light color) and fine sand (dark colors). White lines are bathymetry contours.

Methane seeping on the Virginia margin just shallower than the limit for gas hydrate stability. 

Simulation results for geomorphic change in Suisun Bay, CA (Ganju and Schoellhamer, 2010)

The Instrumented Pressure Testing Chamber (IPTC). A device for measuring the physical properties of naturally-occurring, hydrate-bearing sediment at nearly in situ pressure conditions

Shaded relief image of Northern Cape Cod Bay, MA

Map of the island of Hispaniola that include the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Fault traces are shown as lines with the following descriptions: barbed=thrust fault; solid=strike-slip fault with arrows showing relative direction of motion; black and white=normal fault.

The R/V Rafael performs nearshore geophysical surveys, and includes high resolution sub-bottom profiling, sidescan sonar, and multibeam echosounding in its arsenal of survey capabilities.

Sandra Brosnahan (USGS) collecting water samples (Long Island, NY).

John Pohlman (USGS, left) and colleagues from the University of Alaska Fairbanks examine a sediment core retrieved through winter ice from the bottom of a lake in northern Alaska. Such cores are used to reconstruct methane emissions and climate history over the past 20,000 years.