Publications

Long-term decadal-scale shoreline change is an important parameter for quantifying the stability of coastal systems. The decadal-scale coastal change is controlled by processes that occur on short time scales (such as storms) and long-term processes (such as prevailing waves). The ability to predict decadal-scale shoreline change is not well established and the fundamental physical...

Gas hydrate, a frozen, naturally-occurring, and highly-concentrated form of methane, sequesters significant carbon in the global system and is stable only over a range of low-temperature and moderate-pressure conditions. Gas hydrate is widespread in the sediments of marine continental margins and permafrost areas, locations where ocean and atmospheric warming may perturb the hydrate...

A system of barrier islands and back-barrier bays occurs along southern Long Island, New York, and in many coastal areas worldwide. Characterizing the bay physical response to water level fluctuations is needed to understand flooding during extreme events and evaluate their relation to geomorphological changes. Offshore sea level is one of the main drivers of water level fluctuations in

Hurricane Sandy was one of the most destructive hurricanes in US history, making landfall on the New Jersey coast on Oct 30, 2012. Storm impacts included several barrier island breaches, massive coastal erosion, and flooding. While changes to the subaerial landscape are relatively easily observed, storm-induced changes to the adjacent shoreface and inner continental shelf are more...

Recent investigations of demersal fish communities in deepwater (>50 m) habitats have considerably increased our knowledge of the factors that influence the assemblage structure of fishes across mesophotic to deep-sea depths. While different habitat types influence deepwater fish distribution, whether different types of rugged seafloor features provide functionally equivalent habitat for...

Emergent and submerged vegetation can significantly affect coastal hydrodynamics. However, most deterministic numerical models do not take into account their influence on currents, waves, and turbulence. In this paper, we describe the implementation of a wave-flow-vegetation module into a Coupled-Ocean-Atmosphere-Wave-Sediment Transport (COAWST) modeling system that includes a flow model...

Salt marshes are valued for their ecosystem services, and their vulnerability is typically assessed through biotic and abiotic measurements at individual points on the landscape. However, lateral erosion can lead to rapid marsh loss as marshes build vertically. Marsh sediment budgets represent a spatially integrated measure of competing constructive and destructive forces: a sediment...

Submerged aquatic vegetation is generally thought to attenuate waves, but this interaction remains poorly characterized in shallow-water field settings with locally generated wind waves. Better quantification of wave–vegetation interaction can provide insight to morphodynamic changes in a variety of environments and also is relevant to the planning of nature-based coastal protection...

Gas hydrate formation and dissociation in sediments are accompanied by changes in the bulk volume of the sediment and can lead to changes in sediment properties, loss of integrity for boreholes, and possibly regional subsidence of the ground surface over areas where methane might be produced from gas hydrate in the future. Experiments on sand, silts, and clay subject to different...

In response to the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (US NRC) initiated a long-term research program to improve understanding of tsunami hazard levels for nuclear facilities in the United States. For this effort, the US NRC organized a collaborative research program with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Oceanic and

Physical processes controlling repeated openings and closures of a barrier island breach between a bay and the open ocean are studied using aerial photographs and atmospheric and hydrodynamic observations. The breach site is located on Pea Island along the Outer Banks, separating Pamlico Sound from the Atlantic Ocean. Wind direction was a major control on the pressure gradients between...

Earthquake data from two short-period ocean-bottom seismometer (OBS) networks deployed for over a year on the continental slope off New York and southern New England were used to evaluate seismicity and ground motions along the continental margin. Our OBS networks located only one earthquake of Mc∼1.5 near the shelf edge during six months of recording, suggesting that seismic activity...