Publications

The US Geological Survey’s ShakeMap is used domestically and globally for post-earthquake emergency management and response, engineering analyses, financial instruments, and other decision-making activities. Recent developments in the insurance, reinsurance, and catastrophe bond sectors link payouts of potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to ShakeMap products. Similarly, building...

In order to reconstruct the ecosystem structure of chemosynthetic environments in the fossil record, geochemical proxies must be developed. Here, we present a suite of novel compound-specific isotope parameters for tracing chemosynthetic production with a focus on understanding nitrogen dynamics in deep-sea cold seep environments. We examined the chemosymbiotic bivalve Bathymodiolus...

The effects of runoff from land on nearshore ecosystems, including coral reef communities, are influenced by both sediment supply and removal by coastal processes. Integrated studies across the land-sea interface describing sources and transport of terrestrial sediment and its nearshore fate allow reef protection initiatives to target key onshore and offshore areas. Geochemical...

On 22 March 2014, a massive, catastrophic landslide occurred near Oso, Washington, USA, sweeping more than 1 km across the adjacent valley flats and killing 43 people. For the following 5 weeks, hundreds of workers engaged in an exhaustive search, rescue, and recovery effort directly in the landslide runout path. These workers could not avoid the risks posed by additional large-scale...

Significant sediment flux and deposition in a sedimentary system are influenced by climate changes, tectonics, lithology, and the sedimentary system's internal dynamics. Identifying the timing of depositional periods from stratigraphic records is a first step to critically evaluate the controls of sediment flux and deposition. Here, we show that ages of single-grain K-feldspar...

At marine methane seeps, vast quantities of methane move through the shallow subseafloor, where it is largely consumed by microbial communities. This process plays an important role in global methane dynamics, but we have yet to identify all of the methane sinks in the deep sea. Here, we conducted a continental-scale survey of seven geologically diverse seafloor seeps and found that...

Infiltration-induced landslides threaten transportation infrastructure around the world, and impose both direct costs through repair and remediation work and indirect costs through lost economic activity. Therefore, finding the most cost-effective techniques to mitigate slope failures that can impact critical infrastructure links is desirable. The Straight Creek landslide, which affects...

Post-wildfire changes to hydrologic and geomorphic systems can lead to widespread sediment redistribution. Understanding how sediment moves through a watershed is crucial for assessing hazards, developing debris flow inundation models, engineering sediment retention solutions, and quantifying the role that disturbances play in landscape evolution. In this study, we used terrestrial and...

Introduction Structure from motion (SFM) has become an integral technique in coastal change assessment; the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) used Agisoft Metashape Professional Edition photogrammetry software to develop a workflow that processes coastline aerial imagery collected in response to storms since Hurricane Florence in 2018. This report details step-by-step instructions to create...

Landscape change in Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National Park, California, was characterized using data derived from four lidar surveys: one airborne survey in 2006 and three terrestrial surveys in 2016, 2017, and 2018. These surveys were used to generate a better quantitative understanding of changes associated with fluvial processes along the reach of the Tuolumne River within Tuolumne...

Connecting earthquake nucleation in basement rock to fluid injection in basal, sedimentary reservoirs, depends heavily on choices related to the poroelastic properties of the fluid-rock system, thermo-chemical effects notwithstanding. Direct constraints on these parameters outside of laboratory settings are rare, and it is commonly assumed that the rock layers are isotropic. With the...

In southern California, plate boundary motion between the North American and Pacific plates is distributed across several sub-parallel fault systems. The offshore faults of the California Continental Borderland (CCB) are thought to accommodate ~10-15% of the total plate boundary motion, but the exact distribution of slip and the mechanics of slip partitioning remain uncertain. The...