Unified Interior Regions

While Hurricane Dennis is little more than a soggy memory, scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) are hard at work trying to understand how the storm changed the landscape of beaches along the Virginia and Carolina coasts.

USGS scientists, managers and experts from a diverse spectrum of scientific disciplines are on high alert Friday as Hurricane Dennis seems poised to make landfall along the southeastern coast of the United States sometime this weekend.

The mysterious brain disease responsible for the deaths of bald eagles and American coots in Arkansas has now been found in two species of ducks discovered dead at Woodlake, North Carolina, and in bald eagles and coots from three other southeastern states.

From the large, open-air pens where they have spent the past two weeks, eight young whooping cranes survey their surroundings. The rural, central Florida landscape of open prairie, brush, and marshlands stretches away as far as the birds can see, though only a few tens of miles separate the Kissimmee release site from the metropolitan sprawl of Orlando.

Elvis and Beale Street are not the only things around Memphis that have been known to rock and roll. The strongest and most widely felt earthquakes in the conterminous United States occurred in 1811-1812 in the Mississippi River Valley.

A century of alterations by humans to the Everglades ecosystem has lowered water levels and changed Everglades plant communities more than what would be expected from natural climatic changes alone over the last 2,000 years, according to scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey. 

Heavy rainfall and flooding prompted an emergency response from USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) engineers and field technicians to keep stream gages operational during and after Hurricane Georges. Personnel from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida are working to secure gages threatened by rising rivers and streams or damaged by the storm. Some gaging stations monitored by the USGS are used

Hurricane Georges approached Puerto Rico on September 21, 1998 as a Category 3 hurricane. According to the National Weather Service, Hurricane Georges had sustained winds between 110 to 130 mph and gusts that probably exceeded 150 mph in the mountains of central Puerto Rico.

...Initial concerns about severe flooding give way to thoughts of coasts and ecosystems.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is once again faced with the ominous task of preparing to monitor the effects of a potentially damaging hurricane, Georges, to the southeast coast of the United States

Electricity may be out and communication lines cut off by the tremendous winds and torrential rains of Hurricane Georges, but thanks to good foresight in "hardening" monitoring systems by the U.S. Geological Survey, real-time streamflow data in Puerto Rico continued to flow to reservoir operators, emergency officials, and others who need streamflow information and need it fast.