Unified Interior Regions

On October 17, 2018, 17 staff members from the City of Santa Cruz, California toured USGS facilities in the city.

By Thomas M. Brocher, Jack Boatwright, James J. Lienkaemper, Carol S. Prentice, David P. Schwartz, and Howard Bundock

Drawn from: USGS Fact Sheet 2018-3052

Large underwater experiment in California’s Monterey Canyon shows that “turbidity currents” are not just currents, but involve movement of the seafloor itself.

On September 18, Congressman Jimmy Panetta (20th district, California) and staffer Emmanuel Garcia visited the USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center in Santa Cruz.

Did you know that the USGS is studying raptors in California? Biologists with the USGS Western Ecological Research Center are hard at work in the field, learning more about the ecology of Northern Harriers and their interactions with migratory waterfowl of concern to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

From July 31 to August 23, a joint USGS-NOAA cruise mapped seafloor depths, texture, and gas seeps in the Cascadia subduction zone offshore of Washington, Oregon, and northern California.

USGS and NASA researchers met July 16 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to discuss Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery of the Southern California coast collected during higher-than-normal tides (“king tides”) in fall 2016.

New report on how the bend in an offshore fault helps shape the Big Sur coast

In recent years, invasive aquatic plants have increased exponentially in the shallow waters of California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, clogging about 17,400 acres (nearly 30 square miles) of the waterways. Among the plants’ many effects are changes in the way mud and sand move through the region.

Many amphibians are either too small or too slow to avoid an oncoming car. For some populations of the Federally threatened Yosemite toad (Anaxyrus canorus), this has meant increased mortality from vehicle strikes in addition to other threats from disease, drought, and habitat loss.

Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today announced the release of new science and planning tools to support California’s continued leadership on actions to address climate change and safeguard the state’s people, economy and resources.