Research Geologist Jenna Hill Joins the Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center 

This article is part of the June-July 2017 issue of the Sound Waves newsletter.

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We are pleased to welcome research geologist Jenna Hill, who recently joined the USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center in Santa Cruz, California. Jenna comes to us from Coastal Carolina University, where she was an associate professor of marine science. She spent the past 10 years there teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in geology and geophysics, and working on a wide range of marine geological research topics. 

After finishing undergraduate studies at Oberlin College, Jenna worked for two years with our colleagues at the USGS Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center in Massachusetts. Then she moved to La Jolla, California, to earn a Ph.D. at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Her interests include stratigraphic and structural evolution of continental margins, submarine-landslide generation, inner-shelf sedimentary processes, and even paleoclimate reconstructions. For example, Jenna published a paper in Nature Geoscience in 2014 describing iceberg keel marks on the seafloor off the southeastern U.S. and their implications for ocean circulation (see “Subtropical iceberg scours and meltwater routing in the deglacial western North Atlantic”). Jenna is planning to dive into the subduction-zone hazards studies that are unfolding throughout the Natural Hazards Mission Area (see “Reducing risk where tectonic plates collide”). She also has keen interests and ongoing projects offshore of California, Alaska, and the U.S. Atlantic coast, including continued studies of those subtropical iceberg scours. 

Stay tuned!