Images

Our coasts, the most familiar part of the ocean are the gateway to the larger deeper ocean world. USGS studies processes and hazards in the coastal zone and how they affect people, wildlife, and ecosystems.

The USGS Coastal Change Hazards Portal contains an interactive map of historical shoreline positions and shoreline change rates for Puerto Rico.  

The USGS “Heil Ranch” site is located in the Arapahoe-Roosevelt National Forest in Colorado. The site consists of instrumentation monitoring the rainfall and soil moisture.

Trayectorias de los huracanes Hugo (1989), Georges (1998), Irma (2017) y María (2017). Datos provistos por la NOAA. La imagen de base es propiedad intelectual de Esri y se usa aquí bajo licencia. Los derechos de autor y reproducción son propiedad de Esri y sus licenciatarios. 

Close-up oblique views of Mount Rainier’s west side showing simulated lahar flow depths from a landslide originating in the area of the Tahoma Glacier Headwall (T-260-HM simulation). Imagery appears blurry where lahar material is absent because D-Claw’s adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) employs very coarse resolution in those areas.

Fault sections being used in the creation of the 2023 U.S. Seismic Hazard Maps. Blue lines are normal faults, yellow lines are reverse faults, and red lines are strike-slip faults.

Noa Randall and Rachel Allen are installing an optical turbidity sensor on the mudflats in Wellfleet harbor, to pair with the altimeter run by the Center for Coastal Studies.  The Herring River, which drains into Wellfleet Harbor, is slated to have its 100-yo dam removed in the next 6 months, with the potential to dramatically increase the sediment load and sus

Looking over the dunes towards the beach in the Otis Pike Fire Island High Dune Wilderness at Fire Island, New York. 

Scientists collected sand auger cores from Fire Island to help reconstruct the evolution of the barrier over the last several centuries, with the goal of quantifying changes in sediment input and partitioning through time (e.g., how sand is distributed between the terrestrial portion of the barrier and the beach/shoreface).

The USGS Latest Earthquakes Map provides is an interactive tool that provides detailed information about the latest earthquakes worldwide.

The USGS National Water Dashboard provides real-time stream, lake, reservoir, precipitation, water quality and groundwater station in context with current weather and hazard conditions.

In collaboration with the National Park Service, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the Vesta Corporation, the Environmental Geosciences group researched a new approach to climate change mitigation. The team led an experiment at the Herring River site as a first examination.

The USGS Puerto Rico Landslide Susceptibility Map provides an interactive tool to assess landslide risk in Puerto Rico from low susceptibility to extremely high.

Completed landslide monitoring station at Adjuntas, Puerto Rico among the palms. One of the sites in the Puerto Rico Landslide Monitoring Network.

Kelli Baxstrom wires sensors to a datalogger after sensors are installed underground at the Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, landslide monitoring site, part of the Puerto Rico Landslide Monitoring Network.

Completed landslide monitoring station at Adjuntas, Puerto Rico among the palms.

Triptych of images showing wildfire, roadside flooding, and the Big Sur coastline in California.

The wee strand is a beach along the head of of Loch Indaal, Scotland. Loch Indaal is an ocean bay on Islay, the southernmost island of the Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland.

This is a coloring page for the USGS I Am A... career series depicting a Volcanologist.

Debris flow in Glenwood Canyon during the summer of 2021. This event followed the 2020 Grizzly Creek Fire in Glenwood Canyon, Colorado. 

Interstate 70 in Glenwood Canyon, Colorado. In the summer of 2021, travelers in Colorado's Glenwood Canyon were safely evacuated before massive debris flows buried highways and destroyed bridges, thanks to a debris flow warning system developed in part by the U.S. Geological Survey.