San Francisco Bay

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Shaded Relief (216 kb) - Backscatter (231 kb)
Stereo Relief (98 kb) - Perspective Views

To support the multi-disciplinary San Francisco Bay Project, the sea floor of the west-central San Francisco Bay was mapped using a high-resolution multibeam system. The resulting images provide an unprecedented view of the various bedform fields in west-central San Francisco Bay, many unknown until this survey.

Our specific tasks were to:

map the western section of west-central San Francisco Bay
determine the distribution of bedforms (marine equivalent of sand dunes)
image the waste disposal site just south of Alcatraz Island
determine the heights and volumes of rock outcrops that lay directly in the path of ocean tankers that transit San Francisco Bay heading for the Oakland marine terminals.

This mapping effort was a cooperative project with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who provided raw multibeam data from a vital area immediately east of Alcatraz Island.

U.S. Department of the Interior U.S. Geological Survey Western Coastal & Marine Geology Seafloor Mapping

URL: http://walrus.wr.usgs.gov/pacmaps/sf_index.html
maintained by Pete Dartnell
last modified 15 November 2006 (lzt)