Images

Groundwater science doesn't take a winter vacation! In this photo, USGS hdyrologic technician Jeremiah Pomerleau has snowshoed to a USGS groundwater monitoring site in Eustis, Maine. USGS scientists visit USGS groundwater observation wells year-round to measure water levels and maintain equipment.

You may know that groundwater serves many purposes worldwide. Of course, drinking water and domestic uses of water are major components of those uses. The ways of getting at groundwater differ depending on the local underground conditions.

Clearing the ice and snow to measure streamflow in South Fork Spread Creek. 

High-spatial-resolution airborne images of the Tern Lake area from 1994, 2006, and 2017. The area of bright pixels identified in the Landsat-8 thermal infrared image corresponds to a newly emerging area of warm ground and tree kills about 32,500 m² (8 acres, or 4 soccer fields) in area.

Landsat-8 nighttime thermal infrared image from April 2017 showing the Tern Lake area. In Yellowstone, temperatures are extremely cold at night in the winter, and most lakes are frozen (dark pixels). West Tern Lake seems to be thawing here - perhaps it receives some thermal waters from nearby hot springs.

Map of thermal areas in Yellowstone National Park. Most of Yellowstone's more than 10,000 thermal features are clustered together into about 120 distinct thermal areas (shown in red). Lakes are blue. The Yellowstone Caldera is solid black and the resurgent domes are dotted black. Roads are yellow.

Native sulfur crystals precipitate at Sulphur Banks via a chemical reaction between different sulfur-bearing volcanic gases. USGS image by P. Nadeau.

An HVO geologist removes the sampling tube following the gas collection. Inserting the tube down into the degassing source limits contamination of the volcanic gas sample by atmospheric gases. USGS image by P. Nadeau.

HVO gas geochemists periodically collect gas samples at Sulphur Banks, near the Kīlauea Visitor Center, in Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park. Samples are analyzed for bulk chemistry and for helium isotopes. The results are compared to previous measurements to evaluate potential changes in activity at the volcano.

Partners discuss seasonal drought experiments.

Landsat 8 image of Kandahar, Afghanistan on March 3, 2019, rendered with bands 7, 5, and 1 of the satellite's Operational Land Imager.

Photo of the Deleware River near Lambertville, NJ and New Hope, PA.

USGS Dakota Water Science Center hydrologic technician Mark Brazones is using a handheld acoustic meter to measure the road overflow at the James River near Forestburg, SD. 

After record flooding in the Midwest, USGS crews mobilized to take important water measurements.

USGS technician Chris Broz helps take water measurements on the Big Sioux River during record flooding in March, 2019.

USGS scientists and technicians took water measurements during flooding on the Big Sioux River near Hawarden, Iowa in March 2019.

Diagram of Channel Cross Section With Subsections.

COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) Interferogram for the period from April 6 to June 2, 2019, covering Kīlauea Volcano's summit region. Each color fringe represents 1.65 centimeters (0.65 inches) of ground displacement.

Yellow Creek near Oak Grove, IN - downstream view

USGS hydrologist Kassidy Mapel takes hydrologic measurements from the Kewaunee River, Kewaunee, Wis., at USGS streamgage 04085200.

Aerial photographs were collected from a small, fixed-wing aircraft over the coast of Barter Island, Alaska on July 01 2014, September 07 2014. Precise aircraft position information and structure-from-motion photogrammetric methods were combined to derive a high-resolution orthophotomosaic.