Publications

Quantitative landslide risk assessment is a key step in creating appropriate land use policies. The forced migration of those displaced by recent events in Syria has highlighted the need for studies to guide humanitarian aid and resettlement policies. In 2011, armed conflict in the region precipitated the largest refugee crisis in a generation. Over 1.5 million displaced Syrians now...

The second in a series of USGS Southwest Region (SWR) “Science Exchange” annual workshops, focused on USGS drought science. The participants considered how extreme drought conditions are evolving in much of the American southwest, with an emphasis on integrated drought science planning at the USGS bureau and program levels. The increased need for interdisciplinary science to support...

Multi-beam mapping of the Santa Monica Basin in the eastern Pacific has revealed the existence of a number of elevated bathymetric features, or mounds, harboring cold seep communities. During 2013-2014, mounds at ~600 m water depth were observed for the first time and sampled by Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute’s ROV Doc Ricketts. Active cold seeps were found, but surprisingly...

By coupling with the ground, wind causes ground motion that appears on seismic records as noise across a wide bandwidth. This wind-generated noise can drown out important features such as small earthquakes and prevent observation of normal modes from large earthquakes. Because the wind field is heterogeneous at local scales due to structures, diurnal heating, and topography, wind-induced...

An important predictive variable for site amplification is the site dominant frequency (⁠ƒd⁠). At seismic monitoring stations, ƒd can be calculated from the peak of the horizontal‐to‐vertical spectral ratios (HVSRs) obtained from earthquake recordings (eHVSR). For other sites, ƒd can be estimated from microseismic (mHVSR) observations. We compare the ƒd values derived from eHVSR (5%...

Recent increases in earthquake occurrence rates in Oklahoma have been linked to the injection of large volumes of saltwater, a byproduct of oil and gas extraction. Here we present a detailed study of remote earthquake triggering in an area of active injection‐induced seismicity in northern Oklahoma using data from the LArge‐n Seismic Survey in Oklahoma (LASSO) temporary array and nearby...

Coastal inundation due to sea level rise (SLR) is projected to displace hundreds of millions of people worldwide over the next century, creating significant economic, humanitarian, and national-security challenges. However, the majority of previous efforts to characterize potential coastal impacts of climate change have focused primarily on long-term SLR with a static tide level, and...

Along the rugged coast of Big Sur, California, the Mud Creek landslide failed catastrophically on May 20, 2017 and destroyed over 400 m of scenic California State Highway 1. We collected structure-from-motion (SfM) photogrammetry data using airborne platforms that, when combined with existing airborne lidar data, revealed that the area exhibited significant topographic change and...

Geochemical compositions of fine-grained stream sediment from four drainages on the north shore of the island of Kauai, Hawaii, west of Hanalei and two back-beach sites were explored to increase understanding about land-based runoff and ecological risk from runoff to nearshore coral communities. Stream and beach sediment were collected between July 30 and August 2, 2016, and major, minor...

Arctic permafrost stores vast amounts of methane (CH4) in subsurface reservoirs. Thawing permafrost creates areas for this potent greenhouse gas to be released to the atmosphere. Identifying ‘hot spots’ of methane flux on a local scale has been limited by the spatial scales of traditional ground-based or satellite-based methane-sampling methods. Here we present a reliable and an easily...

The Arbuckle Group is the principal reservoir used for wastewater disposal in Oklahoma. In Osage County—a seismically quiet part of the state—continuous measurements of fluid pressure reveal that pressure in the reservoir is increasing by at least 5 kPa annually and sometimes at a much higher rate. Tidal analysis reveals that fluid level changes lead the local strain tides, with no...

We determine earthquake stress drops directly from the Arias intensity database of NGA-West2. Arias intensity (Arias, 1970) is an engineering measure proportional to the integral of the absolute value of acceleration squared, over the significant duration of the signal. As such, it is closely related to root-mean-square acceleration, and can readily be connected to earthquake stress drop...