Images

A crew of USGS scientists prepares equipment, including personal watercraft, to collect nearshore bathymetry and sub-surface geology data to assess the impacts of Hurricane Sandy.

Highly diverse and resilient reef within Bird Island Marine Protected Area, Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands.

Divers from the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands reef resiliency team conduct assessments of reef resilience in the Marianas archipelago.

Underwater photo of a healthy coral reef.

A buoy instrumented to collect meteorological observations is recovered off Fire Island, NY in 2014.  The data collected is part of a study of the coastal processes that mobilize and transport sediment in the region
 

A remotely operated vessel starts a survey at dawn off Fire Island, NY in 2014.  The data collected is part of a study of the coastal processes that mobilize and transport sediment in the region

USGS tilt current meter (white cylinder) in overwash channel in the Sandwich Town Beach flooded during a Nor'Easter in March 2014

Large swells from the north-northeast with heights up to 5 meters (16 feet) combined with unusually high tides inundated much of the Republic of the Marshall Islands on March 2, 2014.

Waves wash over a road on Roi-Namur Island, Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, during a particularly high tidal event. USGS is studying how slightly reduced rainfall combined with sea-level rise affect freshwater sources on low-lying Pacific coral islands.

Wave-driven flooding and overwash on Roi-Namur Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands

Wave-driven flooding and overwash on Roi-Namur Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands

Schematic geologic cross section of Southern Oʻahu showing groundwater–seawater interaction in the vicinity of Honolulu, HI (modified from Frans et al., 2012).

Every inch of the deck of the R/V Connecticut is covered by instrumented platforms awaiting deployment on the seafloor south of Fire Island NY in winter 2014.

  Every inch of the deck of the R/V Connecticut is covered by instrumented platforms awaiting deployment on the seafloor south of Fire Island NY in winter 2014. 

Satellite image of Hawaiʻi captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite on January 26, 2014

Snowy owl visitor to CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent in the Arctic Ocean

Hundreds of catsharks, or chainlink dogfish, rest on one of the "Billy Mitchell" Fleet shipwrecks. The shipwreck has also been occupied by colonies of anemones, starfish, and hydroids. 

U.S. Geological Survey scientists (left to right) Jennifer McClain-Counts, Jill Bourque, and Amanda Demopoulos prepare to extract a sediment sample from one of the push cores deployed by the Jason II remotely operated vehicle. 

Juvenile sand lance (Ammodytes hexapterus) (top) and surf smelt (Hypomesus pretiosus) (bottom) collected on Bainbridge Island, Washington. Scale is in inches.

Some areas that would be inundated (in red) during the SAFRR tsunami scenario. Top, in Oakland and Alameda, in the eastern San Francisco Bay area, large parts of the Oakland Airport would be flooded.

Maximum current speeds for the Port of Los Angeles (POLA) and the Port of Long Beach (POLB) generated during the SAFRR tsunami scenario. The ports are protected by a breakwater, but during the tsunami there would be dangerously fast currents around the port entrances in the wall, locally referred to as “Angels Gate” (at POLA) and “Queens Gate” (at POLB).