According to USGS, four earthquakes occurred scant hours apart near and along the Aleutian Arc, the seismically active zone that rings the Gulf of Alaska from the Western Aleutian Islands to the east of Prince William sound. The first of the morning in this region occurred to the north of the arc in the Novarupta […]
Earthquakes in the Nenana Basin region of Interior Alaska last longer and feel much stronger than a quake of comparable magnitude would in a non-basin region, due to the behavior of the seismic waves once they reach the area. That’s because the seismic waves get amplified as they bounce back and forth off the sides […]
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 […]