Publications

Airborne monitoring of Mount St. Helens by the USGS began inMay 1980 for sulfur dioxide emissions and in July 1980 forcarbon dioxide emissions. A correlation spectrometer, orCOSPEC, was used to measure sulfur dioxide in Mount St.Helens' plume. The upward-looking COSPEC was mounted in afixed-wing aircraft and flown below and at right angles to theplume. Typically, three to six traverses...

No abstract available.

North Slope crude oil spilled from the T/V Exxon Valdez in March 1989 and contaminated about 500 km of Prince William Sound shoreline. Aliphatic and aromatic hydrocarbons in oil samples collected in August 1990 and June 1992 from beaches on six islands impacted by the spill have been compared with the hydrocarbons from North Slope crude oil taken from the stricken tanker. Degradation...

Many types of landslide movement are induced by large rainstorms, and empirical rainfall intensity/duration thresholds for initiating movement have been determined for various parts of the world. In this paper, I present a simple pressure diffusion model that provides a physically based hydrologic link between rainfall intensity/duration at the ground surface and destabilizing pore-water...

The December 1989–June 1990 eruption of Redoubt Volcano affected commercial and military air operations in the vicinity of Anchorage, Alaska. These effects were due to the direct impact of volcanic ash on jet aircraft, as well as to the rerouting and cancellations of flight operations owing to eruptive activity. Between December and February, five commercial jetliners were damaged from...

Trace-element abundances were measured in situ by ion microprobe in five samples of hornblende and melt ranging from basaltic andesite to high-silica rhyolite. Except for one sample, for which quench overgrowth or disequilibrium is suspected, the abundance ratios show systematic inter-element and inter-sample variations, and probably approach true partition coefficients. Apparent...

A large landslide failed catastrophically along steep, 90-m (300-ft) high bluffs overlooking the waters of Puget Sound at Tacoma, Washington, in April of 1949, three days after the region was struck by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake. The area of failure was investigated to estimate the static and seismic stability of the pre-earthquake slope and to identify factors that contributed to the...

The papers in this chapter discuss some of the failures and successes that resulted from the societal response by a multitude of agencies to the Loma Prieta earthquake. Some of the lessons learned were old ones relearned. Other lessons were obvious ones which had gone unnoticed. Still, knowledge gained from past earthquakes spawned planning and mitigation efforts which proved to be...

No abstract available.

Opaline sinter samples collected at Yellowstone National Park (YNP) were analyzed for gold by neutron activation and for other trace elements by the inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES) method. No correlation was found between Au and As, Sb, or total Fe in the sinters, although the sample containing the highest Au also contains the highest Sb. There also was...

[No abstract available]

Modelling of the KRISP 90 axial line data shows that major crustal thinning occurs along the axis of the Kenya Rift from Moho depths of 35 km in the south beneath the Kenya Dome in the vicinity of Lake Naivasha to 20 km in the north beneath Lake Turkana. Low Pn velocities of 7.5–7.7 km/s are found beneath the whole of the axial line. The results indicate that crustal extension increases...