Publications

Despite growing interest and investment in salt-marsh restoration, relatively few marshes subjected to restoration efforts have been systematically monitored to assess physical restoration trajectory or success. In south San Francisco Bay, CA, USA, where 83% of wetlands were lost via human manipulation, the largest wetland restoration effort on the U.S. west coast is currently underway...

Coastal resilience has become a pressing global issue due to the growing vulnerability of coastlines to the effects of climate change. Nature-based solutions have emerged as a promising approach to coastal protection to not only enhance coastal resilience, but also restore critical ecosystems. Coral reef restoration has the potential to provide ecosystem services benefits; however, there...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) provides science and data on seabed mineral resources and ecosystems, as well as on the potential hazards associated with extraction. The Nation relies on minerals for infrastructure, technology, manufacturing, and energy production. Critical minerals are essential to the economic and national security of the United States and have a supply chain...

Robust and reliable models are needed to understand how coastlines will evolve over the coming decades, driven by both natural variability and climate change. This study evaluated how accurately five popular ‘reduced-complexity’ models replicate multi-decadal shoreline change at Narrabeen-Collaroy Beach, a sandy embayment in Sydney, Australia. Measured shoreline positions derived from

Coastal erosion, intensified by sea level rise, poses significant threats to coastal communities in Hawaiʻi and similar island communities. This study projects long-term shoreline change on the Hawaiian Island of O‘ahu using the data-assimilated CoSMoS-COAST shoreline change model. CoSMoS-COAST models four key shoreline processes: (1) Alongshore transport, (2) Recession due to sea level...

Great Aleutian underthrusting earthquakes produced destructive tsunamis impacting Hawaiʻi in 1946 and 1957. Prior modeling of the 1957 tsunami deposit and runup records on eastern Aleutian and Hawaiian Islands jointly with tide-gauge observations across the Pacific Ocean constrained a rupture model with shallow slip up to 26 m along 600 km of the plate boundary. Here we implement this...

The removal of Glines Canyon Dam on the Elwha River in western Washington, USA, from 2011 to 2014 introduced a 20-Mt pulse of stored sediment and logs into the downstream channel. We used terrestrial laser scanning, high-resolution orthoimages, and surveys of large wood (LW) and sediment grain-size distribution to quantify changes to the channel and LW in four different geomorphic...

No abstract available.

The origin of the Aleutian Basin is unresolved because its crust is deeply buried beneath sediments. It has been interpreted as forming in the Eocene when the Beringian convergent margin jumped seaward to south of the Aleutian arc, thereby capturing a large sector of Cretaceous Pacific crust. Alternatively, it may have formed by backarc spreading. We present new magnetic and seismic...

Multi-organizational principal investigators formed a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Powell Center Working Group (WG), Tsunami Source Standardization for Hazards Mitigation in the United States, to develop a comprehensive series of sources capable of generating tsunamis that could impact U.S. state and territory coastal areas using probabilistic tsunami hazard analysis (PTHA). PTHA...

Sediments in critical marine mineral environments are of wide importance due to their preservation of both marine minerals and organic carbon (OC) stocks. However, OC storage and cycling is often overlooked in mineral system studies. This work characterizes sedimentary OC within the Escanaba Trough, a hydrothermal sulfide system off the coast of northern California. By utilizing ROV...

We report on remote sensing techniques developed to characterize seasonal shoreline cycles from satellite-derived shoreline measurements. These techniques are applied to 22-yr of shoreline measurements for over 777 km of beach along California's 1,700-km coast, for which the general understanding is that shorelines exhibit winter-narrow and summer-recovery seasonality. We find that...