Images

Dr. David S. Blehert working in a laboratory

USGS scientist takes a sample from a northern pintail duck (Anas acuta) to be tested for avian influenza. 

Early life stage white sturgeon swimming in a laboratory tank.

Single-well tracer tests involve injecting a tracer solution into one port of a multilevel sampling well, creating a tracer cloud in the groundwater, and then monitoring the water chemistry in the tracer cloud from the same well as the tracer cloud moves away from the well.

A USGS scientist prepares a tracer solution in a gas-tight bladder that will be pumped into a zone of nitrate-containing groundwater to monitor the production and consumption of nitric oxide dissolved in groundwater.

USGS researcher Jennifer Agee taking surface sediment oxidation-reduction and pH measurements at Crissy Marsh, a vegetated saltmarsh near the Golden Gate Bridge (background) in San Francisco, CA. Photographer: L. Windham-Myers.

USGS researchers collect samples of dust from a sealcoated parking lot for analysis of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).  PAH concentrations in dust swept from coal-tar-sealcoated parking lots are 100s to 1000s of times higher than those swept from parking lots with other types of surfaces.

Left Image: Managed wetland at the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Preserve (California Central Valley) showing mixed flocks of foraging birds. Photographer: M. Marvin-DiPasquale.

Driveways in an upscale residential subdivision in Lake in the Hills, Ill., are coated with black coal-tar-based sealcoat, contrasting with the white cement sidewalk.

Sealcoat particles abraded from a parking lot with coal-tar-based sealcoat collect by the curbside.  Also shown is a storm drain, half coated with sealcoat, down which the loose particles will be washed by runoff.

A driveway in an upscale residential community in the Lake in the Hills, Ill, is coated with coal-tar-based sealcoat.  The driveway has a basketball hoop and a skateboard ramp.

Photograph of iron(III) oxyhydroxides (yellow-brown color in two left-hand tubes collected on folded filter paper) that was produced in iron(II)-containing groundwater by the addition of nitrate. The tube on the right is a filter collected from the same groundwater before nitrate was added.

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientists collecting bed-sediment samples from Suwanee Creek, Gwinnett County, Georgia, on May 23, 2007. 

Soil sampling in Eastern Colorado indicated that some chemicals introduced to nonirrigated farmland through biosolids application persisted through 468 days, and some chemicals were sufficiently mobile to be detected in soil as deep as 126 centimeters below land surface.

Left:  USGS Employee Sherry Wren removing a square meter of surface sediment in pickleweed dominated marsh along the Petaluma River (California), for a study designed to investigate the role of marsh plant root zone on the cycling of mercury. Photographer: L. Windham-Myers. Date: 4/4/2006

Wildfire is one of the largest sources of re-released mercury to the atmosphere and a component to the widespread movement of inorganic mercury to aquatic sediments.

A USGS scientist collects a water sample for analysis of mineral particles known as colloids. Toxic metals (such as copper in excess) bind to the particles, which are then ingested by aquatic animals.

USGS scientist collecting water-level data from an observation well during an aquifer test at the Naval Air Warfare Center Fractured Rock Research Site, West Trenton, New Jersey.

Close up of a cyanobacteria bloom on Elysian Lake, Minnesota