Reports

The Arctic Alaska Petroleum Province encompasses all lands and adjacent continental shelf areas north of the Brooks Range-Herald arch tectonic belts and south of the northern (outboard) margin of the Alaska rift shoulder. Even though only a small part is thoroughly explored, it is one of the most prolific petroleum provinces in North America, with total known resources (cumulative...

The U.S. Geological Survey’s National Water-Quality Assessment program requires nutrient input for analysis of the national and regional assessment of water quality. Detailed information on nutrient inputs to the environment are needed to understand and address the many serious problems that arise from excess nutrients in the streams and groundwater of the Nation. This report updates...

The eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 produced a debris avalanche that flowed down the upper reaches of the North Fork Toutle River in southwestern Washington, clogging this drainage with sediment. In response to continuous anomalously high sediment flux into the Toutle and Cowlitz Rivers resulting from this avalanche and associated debris flows, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers...

Urban development is an important agent of environmental change in the United States. The urban footprint on the American landscape has expanded during a century and a half of almost continuous development. Eighty percent of Americans now live in metropolitan areas, and the advantages and challenges of living in these developed areas—convenience, congestion, employment, pollution—are...

Approximately 42 percent of all West Virginians rely on groundwater for their domestic water supply. However, prior to 2008, the quality of the West Virginia’s groundwater resource was largely unknown. The need for a statewide assessment of groundwater quality prompted the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP)...

Nutrient enrichment from atmospheric deposition, agricultural activities, wildlife, and domestic sources is a concern at Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island, Maine, because of the potential problems of degradation of water quality and eutrophication in estuaries. Degradation of water quality has been observed at Bass Harbor Marsh estuary in the park but only minimally in...

New geochronologic and thermochronologic data from rocks near Hatcher Pass, southwest Talkeetna Mountains, Alaska, record earliest Paleocene erosional and structural exhumation on the flank of the active Cook Inlet forearc basin. Cretaceous plutons shed sediments to the south, forming the Paleocene Arkose Ridge Formation. A Paleocene(?)-Eocene detachment fault juxtaposed ~60 Ma...

A qualitative freshwater mussel survey was conducted in a section of the main stem Delaware River near the Pond Eddy Bridge site, New York and Pennsylvania, during summer 2011 to assess population levels of state and Federal threatened and endangered species. Historical data that were collected at this site were compared to data from the 2011 survey to assess changes in mussel community

Concentrations of dissolved nitrite plus nitrate increased fairly steadily in samples from four shallow groundwater monitoring wells after biosolids applications to nonirrigated farmland began in 1993. The U.S. Geological Survey began a preliminary assessment of sources of nitrogen in shallow groundwater at part of the biosolids-application area near Deer Trail, Colorado, in 2005 in...

The Late Cretaceous Boulder batholith in southwest Montana consists of the Butte Granite and a group of associated smaller intrusions emplaced into Mesoproterozoic to Mesozoic sedimentary rocks and into the Late Cretaceous Elkhorn Mountains Volcanics. The Boulder batholith is dominated by the voluminous Butte Granite, which is surrounded by as many as a dozen individually named...

A study was initiated in 2009 by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with Routt County, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, and the City of Steamboat Springs, to compile and analyze historic water-quality data and assess water-quality conditions in the Upper Yampa River watershed (UYRW) in northwestern Colorado. Water-quality data for samples collected by federal, state...

The Arctic is warming faster than other regions of the world due to positive climate feedbacks associated with loss of snow and ice. One highly visible consequence has been a rapid decline in Arctic sea ice over the past 3 decades - a decline projected to continue and result in ice-free summers likely as soon as 2030. The polar bear (Ursus maritimus) and the Pacific walrus (Odobenus...