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The ability of water-resource managers to adapt to future climatic change is especially challenging in coastal regions of the world. The East Coast of the United States falls into this category given the high number of people living along the Atlantic seaboard and the added strain on resources as populations...

Assessment of groundwater-flow conditions in the vicinity of production wells in karst and fractured-rock settings commonly is difficult due in part to the lack of detailed hydrogeologic information and the resources needed to collect it. To address this concern and to better understand the hydrogeology and aquifer properties of karst...

Accurate quantification of hydrologic fluxes in lakes is important to resource management and for placing hydrologic solute flux in an appropriate biogeochemical context. Water stable isotopes can be used to describe water movements, but they are typically only effective in lakes with long water residence times. We developed a descriptive...

The Standard Mine Superfund Site is a source of mine drainage and associated heavy metal contamination of surface and groundwaters. The site contains Tertiary polymetallic quartz veins and fault zones that host precious and base metal sulfide mineralization common in Colorado. To assist the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in its...

RecologyTM, the primary San Francisco waste-disposal entity, is proposing to develop a Class 1 landfill near Jungo, Nevada. The proposal calls for the landfill to receive by rail about 20,000 tons of waste per week for up to 50 years. On September 22, 2009, the Interior Appropriation (S.A. 2494) was...

Geophysical data were collected at the Standard Mine in Elk Basin near Crested Butte, Colorado, to help improve the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's understanding of the hydrogeologic controls in the basin and how they affect surface and groundwater interactions with nearby mine workings. These data are discussed in the context...

Tracking landscape-scale water status in high-latitude boreal systems is indispensable to understanding the fate of stored and sequestered carbon in a climate change scenario. Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery provides critical information for water and moisture status in Alaskan boreal environments at the landscape scale. When combined with results...

Life and element cycling on Earth is directly related to electron transfer (or redox) reactions. An understanding of biogeochemical redox processes is crucial for predicting and protecting environmental health and can provide new opportunities for engineered remediation strategies. Energy can be released and stored by means of redox reactions via...

Following wildfires, emergency-response and public-safety agencies are faced often with making evacuation decisions and deploying resources both well in advance of each coming winter storm and during storms themselves. Information critical to this process is provided for recently burned areas in the San Gabriel Mountains of southern California. The National...

A hydrogeologic and water-quality investigation of the Hammonton Land Application Facility (Hammonton LAF) in Hammonton, New Jersey, was conducted to determine the factors that impede the infiltration of treated wastewater and to assess the potential for similar conditions to exist elsewhere in the Coastal Plain of New Jersey (particularly within...

Water-resources data were collected to describe the hydrologic conditions at the Allison Woods research station near Statesville, North Carolina, in the Piedmont Physiographic Province of North Carolina. Data collected by the U.S. Geological Survey and the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Division of Water Quality, from April...

Approximately 300 kg/day of food-grade CO2 was injected through a perforated pipe placed horizontally 2–2.3 m deep during July 9–August 7, 2008 at the MSU-ZERT field test to evaluate atmospheric and near-surface monitoring and detection techniques applicable to the subsurface storage and potential leakage of CO2. As part of this multidisciplinary research project,...

1. Water abstraction strongly affects streams in arid and semiarid ecosystems, particularly where there is a Mediterranean climate. Excessive abstraction reduces the availability of water for human uses downstream and impairs the capacity of streams to support native biota. 2. We investigated the flow regime and related variables in...

Phytoplankton variability is a primary driver of chemical and biological dynamics in the coastal zone because it directly affects water quality, biogeochemical cycling of reactive elements, and food supply to consumer organisms. Much has been learned about patterns of phytoplankton variability within individual ecosystems, but patterns have not been compared...

A field experiment consisting of geophysical logging and tracer testing was conducted in a single well that penetrated a sand‐and‐gravel aquifer at the U.S. Geological Survey Toxic Substances Hydrology research site on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Geophysical logs and flowmeter/pumping measurements were obtained to estimate vertical profiles of porosity ϕ, hydraulic...

The yield (or discharge) of constant-speed pumps varies with the total dynamic head (or lift) against which the pump is discharging. The variation in yield over the operating range of the pump may be substantial. In groundwater simulations that are used for management evaluations or other purposes, where predictive accuracy...

On July 21, 2009, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar proposed a two-year withdrawal of about 1 million acres of Federal land near the Grand Canyon from future mineral entry. These lands are contained in three parcels: two parcels on U.S. Bureau of Land Management land to the north...

The Cedar River alluvial aquifer is the primary source of municipal water in the Cedar Rapids, Iowa area. Municipal wells are completed in the alluvial aquifer at approximately 40 to 80 feet deep. The City of Cedar Rapids and the U.S. Geological Survey have been conducting a cooperative study of...

Fine sediment sources were characterized by chemical composition in an urban watershed, the Northeast Branch Anacostia River, which drains to the Chesapeake Bay. Concentrations of 63 elements and two radionuclides were measured in possible land-based sediment sources and suspended sediment collected from the water column at the watershed outlet during storm events. These tracer concentrations were...

Water-quality data from selected surface-water monitoring sites in the Southeastern United States were assessed for trends in concentrations of nutrients, suspended sediment, and major constituents and for in-stream nutrient and suspended-sediment loads for the period 1973-2005. The area of interest includes river basins draining into the southern Atlantic Ocean, the...

The U.S. Geological Survey and the Naval Facilities Engineering Command Southeast investigated the hydrology and groundwater chemistry in the vicinity of an emulsified vegetable-oil injection zone at Solid Waste Management Unit (SWMU) 17, Naval Weapons Station Charleston, North Charleston, South Carolina. In May 2004, Solutions-IES initiated a Phase-I pilot-scale treatability...

A model was developed to simulate inflow to reservoirs and watershed runoff to streams during three high-flow events between September 2004 and June 2006 for the main-stem subbasin of the Delaware River draining to Trenton, N.J. The model software is a modified version of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Precipitation-Runoff...

The northwest-trending Silver Creek Fault is a 40-km-long strike-slip fault in the eastern Santa Clara Valley, California, that has exhibited different behaviors within a changing San Andreas Fault system over the past 10-15 Ma. Quaternary alluvium several hundred meters thick that buries the northern half of the Silver Creek Fault,...

Nutrients and freshwater delivered by the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers drive algal production in the northern Gulf of Mexico, which eventually results in the widespread occurrence of hypoxic bottom waters along the Louisiana and Texas coast. Researchers have demonstrated a relation between the extent of the hypoxic zone and the...

Data collected for the U.S. Geological Survey National Water-Quality Assessment program from 1992-2001 were used to investigate the relations between nutrient concentrations and nutrient sources, hydrology, and basin characteristics. Regression models were developed to estimate annual flow-weighted concentrations of total nitrogen and total phosphorus using explanatory variables derived from currently...