In May of 2020, local geologists identified a steep, unstable slope that has the potential to become a tsunami-generating landslide in Barry Arm, a glacial fjord 60 miles east of Anchorage, Alaska. With documented cases of tsunami-generating landslides in Alaska including Lituya Bay in 1958 and Taan Fjord in 2015, this new hazard immediately caught the attention of […]
Konrad Steffen, 68, died Aug. 8, 2020, when he fell into a meltwater-filled crevasse on the Greenland ice sheet. The glaciologist never worked in Alaska, but Steffen’s work influenced a scientist here, his countryman Martin Truffer. Truffer was born in Switzerland, as was Steffen. Truffer, a professor who studies glaciers at the Geophysical Institute […]
(Anchorage) — The threat of a large and potentially dangerous tsunami is looming in Prince William Sound, where an increasingly likely landslide could generate a wave with devastating effects on fishermen and recreationalists using the area, the state’s top geologist said. Steve Masterman, director of the Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys (DGGS) said […]
For the 20th straight year, in December 2019 I carried a notebook into the halls of the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Most of those years the conference was in San Francisco (as it was this year). Back in 1999, when one billion fewer people lived on Earth, the 5,000 scientists who […]