Publications

Building on a geology-based assessment of undiscovered, technically recoverable hydrocarbon resources within the Haynesville Formation, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated the water and proppant necessary for development of the remaining resources associated with the Haynesville Sabine Uplift Continuous Gas Assessment Unit. Additionally, projections have been made on the volume of...

The U.S. Army Fort Irwin National Training Center (NTC), 120 miles northeast of Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert of California, obtains its potable water supply from the Bicycle Valley and Langford Valley groundwater basins; Langford Valley groundwater basin is further subdivided into the Langford Well Lake and Irwin groundwater subbasins. The Irwin groundwater subbasin contains younger

The FluOil tool was developed to help with planning and early response for oil spills in rivers where subsurface oil-sediment interactions result in the formation of oil-particle aggregates (OPA). The turbulence and variable velocity associated with water flowing within a natural stream channel creates the conditions needed for an oil slick to break up into small droplets and mix in the...

Study regionThe Russian River watershed, situated in coastal, northern California, experiences hydrologic extremes, including periodic droughts and flooding. Water managers are working to maintain sustainable water supplies and environmental flows, while mitigating flood risks.Study focusThis paper introduces an integrated hydrology and river operations model for the Russian River...

Earthquake catalogs are essential data inputs for seismic hazard modeling. Because earthquake magnitudes are reported in a variety of types (e.g., local magnitudes and moment magnitudes), magnitude conversion relationships must be used to convert the different magnitude types present in a catalog to a uniform magnitude type to avoid biases in the hazard computation. However, these...

The 29 July 2025 Mw 8.8 Kamchatka, Russia, earthquake was the sixth largest instrumentally recorded earthquake. This event was seismically well observed at regional and teleseismic distances, but publicly available near‐source data were sparse at the time of the event, presenting unique challenges for rapid source and impact characterization. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National...

Between 23 and 27 September 2024, antecedent rain followed by Hurricane Helene produced one of the most damaging weather events in southern Appalachia history. The back-to-back storm events resulted in a maximum cumulative rainfall of 848 mm and hurricane-force wind gusts over 170 km/h in western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and southwestern Virginia. The resulting regional...

No abstract available.

The rate of earthquakes in a region is a fundamental input to Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis. We present a Monte Carlo method for computing that rate from seismicity catalogs while including a range of data and analysis uncertainties. This method is applied to regions for which the b value is assumed to be spatially invariant. Each region is broken down into epochs for which each...

The Meadow Bank scarp (MBS) in southeastern Illinois is a linear geomorphic expression, ∼10 km long and ∼8 m high above a relatively flat landscape. It parallels an underlying northeast‐oriented Late‐Precambrian–Early‐Cambrian structural fabric, called the Wabash Valley fault zone, and is within an area of modern, historic, and paleo seismicity, called the Wabash Valley seismic zone. In...

The hydrology of the Upper Mississippi and Illinois Rivers is a fundamental driver of ecosystem patterns and processes across a large portion of the United States. Quantitative hydrologic data for the main stems of these rivers underlie numerous scientific investigations, statistical models, and decision-making processes for local, State, and Federal agencies involved in the Upper...

At many petroleum hydrocarbon spill sites, residual spilled product forms a long-term source of groundwater contamination. The phrase source zone natural depletion is used to refer to the mass loss rates. Overall mass lost under environmental conditions was analyzed using conservative biomarker concentrations for a 1979 oil spill in northern Minnesota, USA. After 40–41 years, an average...