Reports

Digital water-surface profile maps for a 14-mile reach of the Mississippi River near Prairie Island, Minnesota, from the confluence of the St. Croix River at Prescott, Wisconsin, to upstream from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Lock and Dam No. 3 (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers National Inventory of Dams number MN00595) in Welch, Minnesota, were created by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS...

Through the collection and analysis of shallow and deep subseafloor sediments, rocks, fluids, and life, scientific ocean drilling has enriched our understanding of the complex Earth system. Among other achievements, scientific ocean drilling has documented the history of Earth’s climate, the waxing and waning of polar ice sheets, the past changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation, the...

The U.S. Geological Survey has a long history of leading flood-frequency analysis studies. These studies play a critical role in the assessment of risk, protection of lives, and planning and design of flood protection infrastructure. Standard flood-frequency analysis is based on the assumption of stationarity—that is, that the distribution of floods at a given site varies around a...

Relations between stage (water level) and discharge of streamflow through a natural channel are the result of time-varying processes, which are commonly described by time-varying stage-discharge ratings. Hydrographers with the U.S. Geological Survey successfully maintain the accuracy of streamflow data by manually applying time-tested approaches to adapt ratings to temporal changes in...

Using a geology-based assessment methodology, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated undiscovered, technically recoverable mean conventional resources of 4.9 billion barrels of oil and 21 trillion cubic feet of gas within the Volga-Ural Basin Province and technically recoverable mean conventional resources of 1.8 billion barrels of oil and 9.5 trillion cubic of gas in the Timan-Pechora...

Collection of accurate suspended-sediment data using depth-integrating samplers requires that they operate isokinetically, that is, that they sample at the local stream velocity unaffected by the presence of the suspended-sediment sampler. Sub-isokinetic suspended-sediment sampling causes grain-size dependent positive biases in the suspended-sediment concentration measured by the...

Passive membrane samplers—semipermeable membrane devices and polar organic chemical integrative samplers—were deployed for 22 continuous days at 7 sites along the West Maui, Hawaiʻi, coastline in February and March 2017 to assess organic contaminants at shallow coral reef ecosystems from diverse upstream inputs. The distribution of organic compounds observed at these coastal sites showed

The semi-arid Walla Walla River Basin (WWRB) spans 1777 square miles in the states of Washington and Oregon and supports a diverse agricultural region as well as cities and rural communities that are partially reliant on groundwater. Historically, surface water and groundwater data have been collected in the WWRB by several entities including federal, state, local, and tribal governments

Cyanobacteria are a global water-quality concern because these organisms can develop into harmful blooms that affect ecologic, economic, and public health. U.S. Geological Survey scientists worked with the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to develop a structured decision-making template...

Coastal communities in Alaska are undergoing rapid environmental change from increasing temperatures and baseline data are needed to monitor potential impacts. We conducted the first surveys of the abundance and distribution of eelgrass (Zostera marina) and seaweeds in the western part of Izembek National Wildlife Refuge at the end of the Alaska Peninsula. Six embayments and two offshore...