Publications

Approximately half the Nation's original wetland habitats have been lost over the past 200 years. In part, this has been a result of natural evolutionary processes, but human activities, such as dredging wetlands for canals or draining and filling for agriculture, grazing, or development, share a large part of the responsibility for marsh habitat alteration and destruction. Louisiana's...

In the past decade, Earth scientists have recognized the seismic hazards that crustal faults and sedimentary basins pose to Seattle, Washington (Figure 1). In 1998, the US. Geological Survey and its collaborators initiated a series of urban seismic studies of the upper crust to better map seismogenic structures and sedimentary basins in the Puget Lowland. These studies are called the...

At a marsh on the hanging wall of the Seattle fault, fossil brackish water diatom and plant seed assemblages show that the marsh lay near sea level between ∼7500 and 1000 cal yr B.P. This marsh is uniquely situated for recording environmental changes associated with past earthquakes on the Seattle fault. Since 7500 cal yr B.P., changes in fossil diatoms and seeds record several rapid...

In 1946, 1960, and 1964, major tsunamis (giant sea waves usually caused by earthquakes or submarine landslides) struck coastal areas of the Pacific Ocean. In the U.S. alone, these tsunamis killed hundreds of people and caused many tens of millions of dollars in damage. Recent events in Papua New Guinea (1998) and elsewhere are reminders that a catastrophic tsunami could strike U.S...

No abstract available.

The purpose of this report is to provide information on how and why we deploy seismic instruments in and around building structures. The recorded response data from buildings and other instrumented structures can be and are being primarily used to facilitate necessary studies to improve building codes and therefore reduce losses of life and property during damaging earthquakes. Other...

This program, SUDS2SEGY, converts and combines ASCII files created using SUDS2ASC Version 2.60, to a single SEGY file. SUDS2ASC has been used previously to create an ASCII file of three-component seismic data for an individual recording station. However, many seismic processing packages have difficulty reading in ASCII data. In addition, it may be cumbersome to process a separate file...

Long Island Sound is comprised of a rich and spatially heterogeneous mix of sea-floor environments which provide habitat for an equally diverse set of assemblages of soft-sediment communities. Information from recent research on the geomorphological and chemical attributes of these environments, as well as from studies of the hydrodynamics of the Sound, provide the opportunity to develop...

Mercury (Hg) concentrations were measured in 394 surface and core samples from Long Island Sound (LIS). The surface sediment Hg concentration data show a wide spread, ranging from 600 ppb Hg in westernmost LIS. Part of the observed range is related to variations in the bottom sedimentary environments, with higher Hg concentrations in the muddy depositional areas of central and western...

GLORIA sidescan imagery, multibeam bathymetry, seismic profiles, and piston cores (3–5 m penetration) reveal the near-surface geology of the Bryant Canyon turbidite pathway on the continental margin of Louisiana. This pathway extends from the continental shelf edge, across the continental slope, to a deep-sea fan on the continental rise. The pathway is narrow (

Benthic foraminiferal faunas in Long Island Sound (LIS) in the 1940s and 1960s were of low diversity, and dominated by species of the genus Elphidium, mainly Elphidium excavatum clavatum, with common Buccella frigida and Eggerella advena. The distribution of these species was dominantly correlated with depth, but it was not clear which depth-related environmental variable was most...

No abstract available.