Images

A polar bear walking along the Beaufort Sea coast with storm waves breaking behind it, filmed during fieldwork at Barter Island, Alaska.

 A photo collage shows examples of coastal changes at the mouths of small rivers of the world resulting from contributions of new sediment. Imagery from Google Earth.

Research Physical Scientist Donya Frank-Gilchrist visited three classes at Lakeview Fundamental Elementary School for the 2022 Great American Teach-In to discuss wave dynamics, extreme storms, and how these processes alter coastal ecosystems.

A map showing study sites at West Maui, Hawai'i, where passive samplers were deployed to detect groundwater contaminants such as pesticides, pharmaceutical compounds, and personal care products that can harm coral reefs.

Photo of a passive-sampling semipermeable membrane device deployed on a coral reef in West Maui, Hawai'i, to detect organic compounds carried by groundwater discharge.

Geomorphically diverse settings that are experiencing climate-change impacts or are expected to in the coming decades (from upper left to lower right: eroding permafrost coast, river channel, drylands, cryosphere, steep hillslopes, and a recently burned region; photographs by U.S. Geological Survey).

An animation showing tectonic faults across the Eastern Pacific Ocean from space. The San Andreas fault in California is shown in green, and the Cascadia Subduction Zone north of it is shown in yellow. The animation ends at the location of Queen Charlotte-Fairweather fault (in yellow), displaying the latest 30-meter terrain model.

A computed-generated image showing the bathymetry of the Queen Charlotte Fault and the elevation of mountains in the nearshore area, using bathymetry and lidar data.

Our Nation’s coastlines are almost 100,000 miles long. These extensive coastal areas stretch from Maine’s Atlantic shores in the northeast, south along the shores of the Gulf of America and insular areas in the Caribbean.

Doodler uses a concept called human-in-the-loop machine learning to interactively segment an image. Doodler uses "doodles", or a few marks of examples of each class present in the scene, and machine learning completes the scene.

A diagram that compares hand-digitization versus human-in-the-loop image segmentation workflows. The image (a) is the first in data set F, captured by Landsat 8 on 15 February 2015. The hand-drawn polygons (b) are rasterized to create a label image (c). Subplots (d) and (e) show details from the two regions identified in (c).

Legna Torres-Garcia deploys oceanographic instrumentation to measure waves, currents, water temperature and water levels in Dorado, Puerto Rico in October 2022. This deployment will improve computer model accuracy related to total water level forecast. USGS Photo by David Thompson.

A microscopic photo of the invasive foraminifer Trochammina hadai with a U.S. penny for scale. Native to Asia, T. hadai arrived to the U.S. West Coast in the 1980s and has displaced native foraminifers.

A map of the United States showing the regions and river basins that formed the focus groups of the study titled "Stakeholder Engagement to Guide Decision-Relevant Water Data Delivery".

Cover image for Cascadia Subduction Zone coring video, depicting researchers labeling a sediment core aboard a research vessel.

Hurricane Ian made landfall in Southwest Florida as a Category 4 hurricane in September 2022 and impacted both the Gulf of America and Atlantic coasts. In Flagler County, Florida, large waves caused by the storm (on top of storm surge and tides) caused damage to coastal structures, dunes to erode, and roads to be overwashed with sand.

Dan Powers, aboard the Bold Horizon, prepares to deploy a piston core over the Cascadia Subduction Zone, off the northern California coast.

USGS Ocean Science

The USGS Coastal and Marine Hazards and Resources Program is the only federal science program focused on the geology and processes of coastal and marine landscapes.

Research command center on the vessel with live feed of the stern and the ship’s position projected on a bathymetric map.

The M/V Bold Horizon, operated by Eclipse Group, Inc., was contracted by the USGS to support the collection of piston cores and geophysical survey data along the Cascadia margin.  

USGS Coastal Science

The USGS Coastal and Marine Hazards and Resources Program is the only federal science program focused on the geology and processes of coastal and marine landscapes.