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Carolyn Ruppel, PhD

I lead the USGS Gas Hydrates Project, which is jointly funded by the Coastal and Marine Hazards and Resources Program and the Energy Resources Program. Project scientists in Woods Hole and Denver study the resource and climate aspects of natural hydrates. My work also focuses on methane seeps, hydroacoustics, marine environmental compliance, and subsea permafrost on the Arctic coast. 

My primary research focus is on the interaction between methane hydrates (and methane seeps) on one hand and the ocean-atmosphere system on the other. I focus particularly on the US Atlantic and US Pacific margins, as well as Arctic Ocean margins (US Beaufort Sea and Svalbard). I also work on energy issues related to gas hydrates (including delineating their distribution in marine sediments; 2018 MATRIX seismic program on US Atlantic margin), the coexistence of permafrost (including subsea) and hydrates (Beaufort Sea), and reservoir properties of hydrate-bearing sediments.  As a side specialty, I assist with programmatic environmental compliance for USGS marine acoustics surveys.  During my career, I have also worked on marine heat flow data acquisition and analysis, other aspects of the hydrogeology of gas hydrate systems, and coastal zone hydrogeophysics (particularly tidal pumping, inductive EM data, and saline intrusion in surficial aquifers).  My earliest work focused on numerical modeling of large scale tectonic processes and associated particle tracking, continental rifting, and marine analogs for continental tectonic processes.  

*Disclaimer: Listing outside positions with professional scientific organizations on this Staff Profile are for informational purposes only and do not constitute an endorsement of those professional scientific organizations or their activities by the USGS, Department of the Interior, or U.S. Government