Publications

Nearshore areas within Long Island Sound are of great interest to the Connecticut and New York research and resource management communities because of their ecological, recreational, and commercial importance. Although advances in multibeam echosounder technology permit the construction of high-resolution representations of sea-floor topography in deeper waters, limitations inherent in...

The State of Louisiana requested emergency authorization on May 11, 2010, to perform spill mitigation work on the Chandeleur Islands and on all the barrier islands from Grand Terre Island eastward to Sandy Point to enhance the capability of the islands to reduce the movement of oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the marshes. The proposed action-building a barrier berm...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management (CZM) have cooperated to map approximately 200 km² of the Massachusetts inner continental shelf between Duxbury and Hull. This report contains geophysical and geological data collected by the USGS on three cruises between 2006 and 2007. These USGS data are supplemented with a National Oceanic and...

Gridded bathymetry and sidescan-sonar imagery together cover approximately 37.3 square kilometers of sea floor in the vicinity of Edgartown Harbor, Massachusetts. Although originally collected for charting purposes during National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hydrographic survey H11346, these acoustic data, and the sea-floor stations and seismic-reflection lines subsequently...

A variety of algorithms are available for parameterizing the hydrodynamic bottom roughness associated with grain size, saltation, bedforms, and wave–current interaction in coastal ocean models. These parameterizations give rise to spatially and temporally variable bottom-drag coefficients that ostensibly provide better representations of physical processes than uniform and constant...

During the period August 14-23, 2002, the discharge of total suspended solids (TSS) from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority sewage-treatment plant ranged from 32 to 132 milligrams per liter, causing the monthly average discharge to exceed the limit specified in the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System permit. Time-series monitoring data collected by the U.S...

The U.S. Geological Survey Woods Hole Science Center conducted a nearshore geophysical survey offshore of the southern coast of Martha's Vineyard, in the vicinity of the Martha's Vineyard Coastal Observatory in 2007. This mapping program was part of a larger research effort supporting the Office of Naval Research Ripples Directed-Research Initiative studies at Martha's Vineyard Coastal...

Proper understanding of the physical properties of hydrate-bearing sediments is required for interpretation of borehole logs and exploration geophysical data, the analysis of borehole and submarine slope stability, and the formulation of reservoir simulation and production models. Yet current knowledge of geophysical and geotechnical properties of hydrate-bearing sediments is still...

During the 1964 M9.2 great Alaskan earthquake, submarine-slope failures resulted in the generation of highly destructive tsunamis at Port Valdez, Alaska. A high-resolution, mini-sparker reflection profiler was used to image debris lobes, which we attribute to slope failures that occurred both during and prior to the 1964 megathrust event. In these reflection profiles, debris lobe...

No abstract available.

The small‐strain mechanical properties (e.g., seismic velocities) of hydrate‐bearing sediments measured under laboratory conditions provide reference values for calibration of logging and seismic exploration results acquired in hydrate‐bearing formations. Instrumented cells were designed for measuring the compressional (P) and shear (S) velocities of sand, silts, and clay with and...

It is generally recognized that meeting society's emerging environmental science and management needs will require the marine data community to provide simpler, more effective and more interoperable access to its data. There is broad agreement, as well, that data standards are the bedrock upon which interoperability will be built. The path that would bring the marine data community to...