Images

Large waves breaking on cliffs in western Santa Cruz, California, February 13, 2016.

The USGS Coastal and Estuarine Dynamics Group will be deploying a Nanopod at Pea Island DUNEX experiment site to collect oceanographic information.

USGS scientists survey a beach near San Francisco to assist with a comparison of data derived from aerial photos and lidar.

The coastal bluff along East Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz, California are especially vulnerable to rising sea level during big storms. Sometimes even the rip-rap, put in place to protect roadways and homes, cannot protect the bluffs from erosion.

Waves flood across a coastal road near Santa Cruz, California.

View of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk amusement park in Santa Cruz, California. Photo was taken from the bluff on East Cliff Drive, east of the San Lorenzo River mouth. Sand on the beach gets eroded, redistributed, and deposited due to the dynamic conditions brought about by storms and changing river flow.

On remote Barter Island, Alaska, Bruce Richmond (right) and Cordell Johnson drill into 500-foot-thick permafrost using a handheld drill with a 2-inch drill bit—a challenging task! It can take 3 hours to drill nearly 20 feet down.

The research vessel (R/V) Arcticus at its homeport, the Cheboygan Vessel Base in Cheboygan, Michigan.

Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center personnel process data in the dry lab on the M/V Scarlett Isabella

Sunset on the Delmarva Peninsula

Inundated marsh at Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, New Jersey.

Surface sediments will be analyzed for various physical parameters that will be used as initial conditions in hydrodynamic and sediment transport models.

USGS scientists collect sediment samples in a gas hydrates area during a cruise on the U.S. Atlantic margin in 2015.

Near vertical (top, middle) and low angle oblique (bottom) aerial photographs of Oregon Inlet, North Carolina. View looking west along the North Carolina shore. High waves and storm surge from Hurricane Joaquin eroded the beach and inundated the low area in the backshore at Oregon Inlet (A, green box, blue arrows).

Near vertical (top, middle) and low angle oblique (bottom) aerial photographs of Hatteras, North Carolina. View looking north along the North Carolina shore. Waves and surge from Hurricane Joaquin eroded the beach, causing significant shoreline retreat and a narrower beach at the location of the Hurricane Isabel breach in 2003 (green arrow).

   Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center side entrance to the Tilley Conference Room

Map of distribution of substrate mud content, Stellwagen Bank

Enlarged map of the Yakobi Sea Valley. Closeup view (upper right) shows right-lateral offset of the Yakobi Sea Valley wall by the Queen Charlotte-Fairweather fault. MCS, multichannel seismic; km, kilometers. For location, see the southeastern Alaska trackline map.

Photo showing multiple geomorphic environments including from left to right: the Atlantic Ocean, beach, dunes, and island interior.

The advanced circulation (ADCIRC) model unstructured finite element mesh spans the western North Atlantic Tidal domain to the 60-degree west meridian, including the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea and Gulf of America.

Healthy Elkhorn coral (Acropora palmata) near unpopulated Buck Island, U.S. Virgin Islands. Elkhorn coral is one of many important reef-building species that create 3D structure on the seafloor. Coral reef structure provides habitat for marine life and helps break up waves as they approach the coastline.