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A Look at 2022 - Collage

Detailed Description

Collage of imagery:

  • A USGS scientist walks along Santa Cruz Main Beach at the edge of the San Lorenzo River in Santa Cruz, California, wearing a backpack with GPS equipment. She is collecting elevation data that will be used to create a topographic map of the beach. This mapping effort is part of recurring surveys in the Monterey Bay area. Data from these surveys help the USGS understand how sand moves around the Bay, how the beaches, inlets, harbors, and other coastal features change with storms and the seasons, and how the local community may be impacted.
  • An artist’s rendition of Landsat 9 in orbit.
  • As this picture of Muir and Riggs Glaceris in Alaska shows, glaciers are really rivers, but rivers of solid ice instead of liquid water. Just because they are solid does not mean they don't move, though. Glaciers do flow downhill, just very, very slowly. Glaciers begin life as snowflakes. When the snowfall in an area far exceeds the melting that occurs during summer, glaciers start to form. The weight of the accumulated snow compresses the fallen snow into ice. These "rivers" of ice are tremendously heavy, and if they are on land that has a downhill slope the whole ice patch starts to slowly grind its way downhill. These glaciers can vary greatly in size, from a football-field sized patch to a river a hundred miles (161 kilometers) long.
  • USGS diver taking a core of a 100-year-old coral to allow reconstruction of past ocean temperatures in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands.

Sources/Usage

Public Domain.

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