Hooray for sediment cores!

Dr. Nora Nieminski is a research geologist and Mendenhall Fellow at the USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center in Santa Cruz, California. She is pictured here, on board Marine Vessel Bold Horizon, with a piston core sample collected from the southern Cascadia subduction zone offshore of northern California/southern Oregon. The research cruise ran from September-October of 2019 as part of the USGS project, “Cascadia Subduction Zone Marine Geohazards.” The research is focused on characterizing offshore marine geohazards like tsunamis, earthquakes, and underwater landslides along this tectonic boundary, which is prone to megathrust earthquakes.

Once recovered, the cores were extruded and sectioned on deck. Dr. Nieminski is studying these cores to investigate sediment routing and storage along the Cascadia margin and to identify any structural evidence of past earthquake activity that may be present in the sediment.