Images

A coastal marsh site at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge near St. Charles Bay, Texas. A surface elevation table-marker horizon (SET-MH) station is hidden beneath the marsh vegetation. The SET-MH is used to record changes in marsh surface elevation through time. Taken by William C. Vervaeke, 4/5/2018 (USGS).

A scientist wearing a mask, safety googles, and a cap breaks down a permafrost core using a paring knife to conduct aseptic sampling for DNA analysis.

Injecting ¹³C enriched carbon into soil incubations to quantify organo-mineral association of dead microbes with soil minerals.

This image shows the perimeter of Rainbow Glacier in Glacier National Park: 1966, 1998, 2005, 2015. 

Multicores collected from the northern Gulf of Mexico. These cores contain roughly 1 meter of sediment from the seafloor, and represent the past ~2000 years of deposition.

USGS scientist Erich Peitzsch does repair on the Sperry Weather Station in Glacier National Park. Information gathered by the USGS managed Sperry Weather Station are being used by regional fire managers to forecast fire weather and future fire behavior during the 2017 fire season. 

Crews perform repairs on the Sperry Weather Station as part of Fire Operations in Glacier National Park. Information gathered by the USGS managed Sperry Weather Station are being used by regional fire managers to forecast fire weather and future fire behavior during the 2017 fire season. 

Panoramic image from Sperry Glacier in Glacier National Park showing smoke from forest fires. Information gathered by the USGS managed Sperry Weather Station are being used by regional fire managers to forecast fire weather and future fire behavior.

A researcher locates an ablation stake near a crevasse on Wolverine Glacier.  These collapsible poles are used to measure snow and ice melt on the glacier surface.  

Sampling a marine terrace within the Mattole River soil chronosequence to quantify the impact of simulating soil drying and re-wetting on the release of greenhouse gases.

USGS scientist conducts fieldwork in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve following a wildfire.

Sampling permafrost sidewalls of the Vault Tunnel, Alaska, for microbial DNA studies.

USGS scientists Miriam Jones and Kristen Manies working to obtain one of the peat cores they used to determine carbon content, age, and variations in plant remains with depth. They are standing in a bog created when permafrost thawed.

Lemon Creek Glacier is located at the southernmost tip of the Juneau Icefield in Southeast Alaska, USA, approximately 6.5 km northeast of the city of Juneau.

USGS scientist, Chris McNeil, collects data at an ablation stake on Wolverine Glacier near the end of the glacial melt season.

Researchers retrieving ice cores from an ice patch located on the Beartooth Plateau, Wyoming.

Gulkana Glacier is located along the south flank of the eastern Alaska Range. 

Heavily crevassed glacial ice flows across scoured rock in late summer at Gulkana Glacier, AK. 

Heavily crevassed terminus of Gulkana Glacier, AK, near the end of the 2016 ablation (melt) season.

Aerial photo of Sperry Glacier, Digital Globe image taken 08/26/2016. Aerial imagery, like this photo of Sperry Glacier, is used to create digital elevation models (DEMs) used to extrapolate mass balance field measurements over the entire glacier.

A scientist dumps DNA tracer into a moulin on Wolverine Glacier to assess water flow through the glacier as part of research aimed at understanding glacier processes.