Images

East end of Fire Island, showing white sandy beaches and marshes, depicted with airborne imagery, and lidar-derived bathymetric features in the estuary behind the island, in the offshore region, and in the channel connecting the estuary to the ocean. 

Aerial view of a southeast Louisiana coastal marsh.

USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center in Santa Cruz, California installed these two video cameras, pointed at the shoreline. The cameras collected imagery every half hour for 10 minutes, during daylight hours. The images are stored in the cloud and are used to study coastal variations through time, like wave, shoreline, and sandbar dynamics.

 R/V Petrel surveying off Beach Haven, NJ during USGS FA 2018-001-FA

Geologic sections (C-C', D-D', and E-E') illustrating the general distributions and thicknesses of seismic stratigraphic units and major unconformities in the Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket study areas.

Coastal wetland ecosystems in Jamaica Bay, New York, provide important ecosystem services along the highly urbanized Atlantic coast.

A brain coral infected with Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease (SCTLD) in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary in April 2018.

Shaded-relief map of central California showing location of the Big Sur area (white dashed line). Red line shows the San Gregorio-Hosgri fault (SGHF) and the Big Sur Bend between Point Sur (PS) and Piedras Blancas (PB). Black lines show other faults.

Perspective view of part of the Big Sur Bend in the San Gregorio-Hosgri fault. The steep slope beside the fault results from uplift along the fault, which is part of the strike-slip fault system that forms the boundary in California between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates.

Illustration shows the cross-section of a barrier island progressing from ocean (on the right) to marsh and then lagoon (on the left). 

Contractor Babak Tehranirad works on an operational model for forecasting flooding around San Francisco Bay.

Left to right: USGS scientist Josh Logan, USGS contractor Babak Tehranirad, and USGS contractor Rae Taylor-Burns (University of California-Santa Cruz graduate student) collect beach elevation data near Moss Landing, California, with precision GPS units carried in their backpacks.

Babak Tehranirad holds a lobster that he caught while on vacation in March 2017.

RV Petrel towing subbottom profiler (yellow raft) parallel to the beach to measure the thickness of sand offshore.

A WHCMSC and WHOI team recovered six intermediate period ocean bottom seismographs from the continental slope offshore New England in Georges Bank. The instruments had been deployed for about ten months to record background, ambient seismic noise.

Topography and bathymetry of southern Cascadia, which includes southern Oregon and northern California (seafloor depths between 200 and 3000 m are shown in the spectrum color scale from red (shallower) to purple (deeper). The land and continental shelf are shown in grayscale slope shading where darker colors represent steeper slopes.

Top row, left to right: Cordell Johnson (left) and Evan Dailey use the USGS R/V Fast Eddy to collect water samples. Cordell Johnson (left) and Jessie Lacy prepare to deploy a tripod holding instruments to measure water level, currents, and suspended sediment.

Three-dimensional model of Chimney Bluffs, New York along Lake Ontario created from low-altitude digital images collected from an unmanned aerial system (UAS).

3D Image of a multi-channel seismic (MCS) line showing gas (blue/green) migrating up through fractures in the subsurface, culminating in a 600 meter tall plume of methane gas in the water column that was captured using a Simrad EK60 split beam echo sounder.

Two divers work to collect a long core sample from a coral reef in Florida.

Coastal bathymetry, St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, mapped using lidar and depicted with false-color (purple is deep, orange is shallow). Land areas are depicted with satellite imagery.