News

The USGS is joining people across the world to celebrate Earth Day on April 22, 2015. To help build environmental awareness, the USGS has outlined some of the critical issues facing our planet as well as science projects underway to address these challenges.

Small bees that don’t bother or sting us can remain unstudied despite their abundance. 

Wetlands across the U.S. and around the world act as a crucial link between land and water, providing a number of services such as removing excess nutrients, pollutants, and sediment from water and acting as natural buffers to floodwaters. In 1991...

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Nepal on April 25, 2015 at 06:11:26 UTC. Visit the USGS event page to learn more about this earthquake.

Once so cheap it was used for pennies, copper is now so valuable that pennies contain almost no copper and they still cost more than one cent to make.

Are you one in a million? The USGS is part of the millions participating on April 30 for America’s PrepareAthon! You should join too.

The type of precipitation falling from the sky matters, especially for delicate mountain ecosystems.

Along with many countries around the world, the United States faces two significant, and sometimes competing, challenges: (1) providing sustainable supplies of freshwater for humans and ecosystems and (2) ensuring adequate sources of energy for future generations. 

From the 1880s to the 1950s, the U. S. Geological Survey used engraved copper plates in the process of printing many thousands of topographic and  geographic quadrangle maps at several map scales.

The U.S. Geological Survey, through the National Geospatial Program, has delivered more than 18 million US Topo quadrangles and Historic Topographic Maps in the past six years. 

USGS scientists realized that it was not enough to produce maps and reports that would gather dust if  no one was trained to use them.