Images

Northern Lights over the World Heritage site. The aurora is more active when there are solar flares on the sun.

In left foreground, ice-ravaged mafic edifice Little Brother is separated from North Sister by Little Ice Age trough of Collier Glacier. Both North Sister and Little Brother expose numerous oxidized scoria falls, whereas smooth black Middle Sister cone is cloaked by mafic lava flows.

Photo of Crater Lake with oblique bathymetric image of the caldera floor beneath the lake's surface. Oregon

Time history of Yellowstone Caldera uplift (black line) and subsidence patterns along with quarterly catalog earthquake counts (blue bars). Note that large swarms in 1985 and 2010 accompany uplift to subsidence of caldera. The vertical deformation on the right axis was measured at the Sour Creek (SC) dome in the eastern part of the Yellowstone Caldera.

Top: Map of repeating earthquake areas corresponding to the deformation episodes, below. Bottom: Left 1996-1998 Yellowstone caldera uplift episode. Middle: 1998-2004 subsidence episode. Right: 2004-2010 uplift episode. Bottom: vertical ground deformation from GPS observations at station, WLWY, on the Sour Creek resurgent dome.

A sonar on a bottom platform while steaming to the deployment site in the Columbia River in 2013.  The 3 platforms acquired data on currents and sediment transport at the river mouth over several months.

The seismic records or waveforms are from two seismic stations, and show the highly repetitive and similar nature of the seismic events.

Map showing one-year probability of accumulation of 1 centimeter (0.4 inch) or more of tephra from eruptions of volcanoes in the Cascade Range.

Tabernacle Hill tuff cone, part of the Black Rock Desert Volcanic Field in Utah, used to house a lava lake in the center of the crater.

CalVO geologist Mae Marcaida examines thin layers of volcanic ash sandwiched between thick beds of sediment deposited by ancestral Mono Lake in eastern California. Each ash layer is evidence of a past explosive eruption of the Mono Craters, which began erupting about 65,000 years ago just south of present-day Mono Lake.

Map of Mount St. Helens Crater Glacier created from LiDAR data acquired September 2009.

Photo of the seafloor in Block Island Sound showing a rock crab and several shrimp on a boulder that is covered with bryozoans. The photo was collected in support of research and management activities (e.g., wind farms and fisheries) along the Rhode Island inner continental shelf.

Shaded relief image of Vineyard Sound, MA Shoals

USGS technicians prepare a sediment trap to sample the sea floor off Cape Hatteras.

This shaded relief image was produced from LIDAR data. LIDAR is an acronym for Light Detection and Ranging, a modern remote sensing technique used to map topography very accurately—more so than is possible with older techniques. The crater is 1.2 miles (1.9 km) wide east-west. Elsewhere the scale varies owing to the oblique viewing angle.

Wes Hildreth is an expert when it comes to studying the Long Valley Caldera. Here, he is standing on Tertiary basalt lava flows on the north rim of the caldera, view to the southeast with Lake Crowley visible in the center of the caldera, and McGee Mountain above the lake on the skyline.

Eric Moore, Wayne Baldwin, and Tommy O’Brien are deploying multichannel seismic streamer onboard R/V Pelican during a 2013 seismic cruise in the Gulf of Mexico as part of the gas hydrates program. 

Resistivity values for wet (average 7.8 Wt.% moisture content) compacted (lighter shades) and uncompacted (darker shades) fresh ash samples.

The summit lava lake is contained within the Overlook crater, which is about 160 m (520 ft) by 210 m (690 ft) in size, and set within the larger Halema‘uma‘u Crater. The lava lake this week has been about 50 m (160 ft) below the rim of the Overlook crater.

A closer view of the active flows at the forest boundary, and the numerous plumes of smoke resulting from active lava igniting ‘oKAHAKOhi‘a trees and other vegetation.

A closer look at the summit lava lake.