Publications

Using a geology-based assessment methodology, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated undiscovered, technically recoverable mean conventional resources of 67 million barrels of oil and 56 billion cubic feet of gas in the Santa Maria Basin Province of California.

Increased variability in precipitation associated with climate change creates extreme conditions of drought and deluge that can have profound effects on the abundance and composition of plant communities. Responses to these extremes likely vary across climatic gradients and depend on local plant community composition, which includes the emergent, aboveground vegetation as well as...

he Hayward, Calaveras, and Rodgers Creek faults in the San Francisco Bay region of California have a high probability of producing a large earthquake in the next decades. Although these faults creep, the creep is insufficient to keep up with their relatively rapid slip rates on their deepest sections, so they have been storing tectonic strain since their last large earthquakes, with the...

Barrier island resilience to climate impacts depends on sediment redistribution between the subaqueous shoreface and subaerial barrier during sea-level rise and storms. However, autogenic interactions between the upper and lower shoreface and their influence on the subaerial barrier are poorly characterized. Here, we explore the influences of various shoreface components on barrier...

An analysis of 1,375 volcanoes in the Michoacán-Guanajuato (1,148 volcanoes in a 26,200 square-kilometer area) and Sierra Chichinautzin (227 volcanoes in a 3,500 square-kilometer area) volcanic fields in central Mexico identified patterns in the spatial and temporal distribution of past eruptions. A cluster agglomerative hierarchical method and kernel analysis confirmed that the...

Rare earth elements (REEs) are a scarce but vital resource for our modern economies and lifestyles. Since the late 1990s, China has supplied the vast majority of the world’s refined REEs. Increasing global demand has broadened the search for REE deposits to unconventional places, including the Moon. Although most lunar rocks have very low REE concentrations, Apollo samples showed that...

Plasticity of diel activity rhythms may be a key element for adaptations of wildlife populations to changing environmental conditions. In the last decades, grizzly bears Ursus arctos in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) have experienced notable environmental fluctuations, including changes in availability of food sources and severe droughts. Although substantial research has been...

The 2002 Mw 7.9 earthquake in central Alaska ruptured 340 km on three faults—Susitna Glacier thrust fault, Denali fault, Totschunda fault—crossing both the Richardson Highway and the Alaska Pipeline. Its occurrence prompted renewed interest in historical large earthquakes that possibly originated on the Denali fault. One of these earthquakes was a Ms 7.2 event on July 7, 1912, which we...

Great subduction earthquakes (Mw ≥ 8.0) can generate devastating tsunamis by rapidly displacing the seafloor and overlying water column. These potentially tsunamigenic seafloor offsets result from coseismic fault slip and deformation beneath or within the accretionary wedge. The mechanics of these shallow rupture phenomena and their dependence on subduction zone properties remain...

Study regionThe Arkansas Headwaters Basin, an intermountain basin in the Southern Rocky Mountains of North America.Study focusOur specific focus is choosing a set of wells to support a possible future regional groundwater-surface water model that would support water management. We present a three-step process using multiple criteria to score, predict, and choose prioritized wells that...

One hundred years have elapsed since Charles Elton (1924) described the periodic fluctuations in North American snowshoe hare abundance, yet mechanisms underlying 9–11-year population cycles in snowshoe hares continue to be debated.We applied multistate capture–mark–recapture models to long-term field data (1977–2020) based on >20,000 captures of >7000 unique snowshoe hares (Lepus...

Urban stream rehabilitation plans can benefit from knowledge of the landscape setting and vegetative communities that were adjacent to streams prior to urbanization. Downstream to upstream connections of these characteristics can be relevant for native migratory fish species that have a range of preferred spawning habitats. Based on a need for more quantitative data on these potential...