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Photo Roundup - June-July 2020

By Coastal and Marine Hazards and Resources Program July 31, 2020

A selection of coastal and marine images and videos from across the USGS

Sound Waves Newsletter - June-July 2020
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Photograph of USGS staff in the marsh wearing masks
Sources/Usage: Public Domain. View Media Details
Safety is a top priority. USGS staff recently improved access to field sites at the Herring River estuary within the Cape Cod National Seashore to provide safer paths through a phragmites wetland. Research continues largely through deployment of instruments that can take measurements in water and air continuously, but some measurements do require staff, who are implementing USGS guidance on steps to working safely through the pandemic.

 

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A man stands on the bow of a small aluminum boat wearing bib waders, a personal floatation device, and a mask.
Sources/Usage: Public Domain. View Media Details
Marine technician Dan Powers, from the Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center's Marine Facility (PCMSC MarFac), wears all the required personal protective equipment: bib waders, personal floatation device, and mask. He and MarFac engineering technician Pete Dal Ferro went out on Alviso Slough to retrieve and clean current meters that are secured to metal frames. The frames and instruments get pretty fouled-up with mud and vegetation in these shallow waters, requiring frequent cleanings.

 

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The degradation of coastal habitats, particularly coral reefs, raises risks by increasing the exposure of coastal communities to flooding hazards during storms. The protective services of these natural defenses are not assessed in the same rigorous economic terms as artificial defenses, such as seawalls, and therefore often are not considered in decision-making. Here we combine engineering, ecologic, geospatial, social, and economic tools to provide a rigorous valuation of the coastal protection benefits of all U.S. coral reefs in the States of Hawaiʻi and Florida, the territories of Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and Virgin Islands, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. We follow risk-based valuation approaches to map flood zones at 10-square-meter resolution along all 3,100+ kilometers of U.S. reef-lined shorelines for different storm probabilities to account for the effect of coral reefs in reducing coastal flooding. We quantify the coastal flood risk reduction benefits provided by coral reefs across storm return intervals using the latest information from the U.S. Census Bureau, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Bureau of Economic Analysis to identify their annual expected benefits, a measure of the annual protection provided by coral reefs. The annual value of flood risk reduction provided by U.S. coral reefs is more than 18,000 lives and \$1.805 billion in 2010 U.S. dollars. These data provide stakeholders and decision makers with spatially explicit, rigorous valuation of how, where, and when U.S. coral reefs provide critical coastal storm flood reduction benefits, and open up new opportunities to fund their protection and restoration. The overall goal is to ultimately reduce the risk to, and increase the resiliency of, U.S. coastal communities.

Learn more at: https://www.usgs.gov/centers/pcmsc/science/value-us-coral-reefs-risk-red... and https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/ofr2019102

 

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View through the windshield of a boat on a calm bay looking out on calm waters, trees, and a mountain in distance.
Sources/Usage: Public Domain. View Media Details
Looking through the windshield of USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center's boat San Lorenzo under pristine field conditions.

 

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Carol Reiss examining hydrothermal vent sample using hand lens
Sources/Usage: Public Domain. View Media Details
USGS geologist Carol Reiss examining hydrothermal vent sample using hand lens. Sulfide-silicate minerals precipitate from 330°C mineral laden water venting along volcanically active spreading ridges.

 

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A scientist stands in a grassy marsh with a long tube-shaped piece of equipment designed to pull cores of earth from the ground
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A short marsh push core, exhibiting a sandy event layer on top, collected from Point aux Chênes, Mississippi marsh during sample collection in October 2018 for sediment and radiochemical analyses.

 

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A group of six photographs showing equipment used for collecting data in the field.
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Field equipment used by USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center scientists for bathymetric and topographic surveys in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, California.

 

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