I just so happened to be stretched out on good ol’ Mother Earth the other night when an earthquake happened. On a Memorial Day overnight canoe trip, a friend and I had dragged our boats onto the gravel of a little island on the Chena River. After mosquitoes chased us into our tents and we’d […]
In 1958, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake triggered a rockslide into Southeast Alaska’s Lituya Bay, creating a tsunami that ran 1,700 feet up a mountainside before racing out to sea. Researchers now think the region’s widespread loss of glacier ice helped set the stage for the quake. In a recently published research article, scientists with the University […]
A new project will make it possible for scientists to better track a suite of phenomena in Alaska ranging from earthquakes to wildfires to sea ice. The five-year, $6.9 million project funded by the National Science Foundation will enhance measurements of Arctic change across western and northern Alaska. It’s led by the Alaska Earthquake Center, […]
Forty-one volcanoes that have erupted since the 1700s. Eleven percent of the world’s earthquakes. Glaciers of an ever-changing number that probably tops 100,000. Alaska has its share of superlatives, and here’s another one — Alaska has the largest maar on Earth. What’s a maar? It looks a lot like a lake, it’s circular and […]