Images

Equipment used for a measuring lateral fluxes over tidal cycle

Estuarine salt marsh at China Camp State Park looking towards San Pablo Bay, northern San Francisco, California.

A sensor is deployed to measure flow in a channel of the marsh in Rachel Carlson National Wildlife Refuge in 2013.

A lithodid crab seen on a bed of deep sea mussels living near a gas seep 1,600 meters below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. Images courtesy Deepwater Canyons 2013 - Pathways to the Abyss expedition, NOAA-OER/BOEM/USGS.

Images of the remotely operated vehicle Jason2 sampling a sea urchin in a deep sea mussel community found near a gas seep on the U.S. outer continental shelf. Images courtesy Deepwater Canyons 2013 - Pathways to the Abyss expedition, NOAA-OER/BOEM/USGS.

Methane gas bubbles rise from the seafloor—this type of activity, originally noticed by NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer in 2012 on a multibeam sonar survey, is what led scientists to the area. Image courtesy of Deepwater Canyons 2013 – Pathways to the Abyss expedition, NOAA-OER/BOEM/USGS.

Adrian Mann is using a piezometer to extract submarine groundwater to analyze for geochemical parameters in Indian River Bay, DE.

Assessing how storms move sediment during storms provides coastal scientists and managers the information they need to keep coastal communities safe and prosperous. And, lucky for us, provides many opportunities to see great coastal sunsets!

The San Clemente Dam, built in the 1920s on the Carmel River in Monterey County, California, was removed during 2014 and 2015.

Hurricane Sandy moved a house from barrier island to estuary, in this case into Barnegat Bay, NJ. Waves from extreme storms do the same with barrier island sediment.

Debris from Hurricane Sandy (Seaside Heights, NJ) is piled up behind an artificial dune in order to protect island infrastructure from the subsequent winter storm season. Like storms, humans change coasts too.

Surveying A Barrier Island Evolution Research (BIER) program study site in the Chandeleur Islands in 2013. The survey data is used to map the pre-storm conditions.
 

USGS Graduate Research Assistant Legna Torres-Garcia installs a temperature logger on a coral reef in Dry Tortugas National Park. She and her team deployed a vertical array with temperature loggers every 1m from the seabed to near-surface with the goal to capture any changes in temperature through time and across depth.

Trunk River is an example of a tidally restricted impounded wetland (Cape Cod, MA).

Drone footage taken of the Woods Hole Oceanographic facility on the Quissett campus in Woods Hole Ma.  This is an example of a tidally restricted marsh system cutoff from tidal flows by the bike path.

Close-up image of the cold-water coral Lophelia pertusa, with polyps extended. The coral polyps eat by grabbing tiny suspended particulates (visible against the dark water background). The bright orange claws of a squat lobster (Eumunida picta) can be seen peeking out from behind the coral branches.

Live Lophelia pertusa is white because the calcium carbonate skeleton shows through the nonpigmented coral tissue. Dead coral is soon covered in a brown biofilm. The red-orange squat lobster (Eumunida picta) in the center of the photo is prepared to catch its dinner.

Figure 2 from the 2012 publication, "Arrival and Expansion of the Invasive Foraminifera Trochammina hadai Uchio in Padilla Bay, Washington," by McGann, et al. Trochammina hadai Uchio: A, dorsal view; B, edge view; C, ventral view.

Aerial images of the wilderness breach: a) Aerial photograph taken several days after Hurricane Sandy (photo credit: NOAA); b) Aerial mosaic of the breach in June 2015 showing the location of erosion on the ocean side of the breach and deposition that results in the seasonal formation of a spit.

Gas hydrate at the seafloor on the U.S. Atlantic margin. The icy deposit formed as gas bubbles emitted from the seafloor transformed into methane hydrate beneath the overhanging rock.

USGS hydrologic technician Kurt Weidich services continuous monitoring instruments at the Dumbarton Bridge in south San Francisco Bay.