Tip of the Iceberg by Mark Adams

Author:Mark Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

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If you were to take a map of the Pacific Ocean and trace a rough horseshoe-shaped line starting in New Zealand, jogging left through Indonesia, then up along the coast of Asia through the Philippines and Japan, across the Bering Strait, down along the Alaska coast, and finally hugging the coasts of North and South America through Chile, you would have outlined the Ring of Fire. This band of seismic activity accounts for 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes and is home to most of the world’s volcanoes. A rich mythology developed across cultures to explain this instability. In Japan, the Namazu was a giant catfish that occasionally escaped and shook the earth with its thrashing. The Tlingit people had several stories to explain the seismicity of Southeast Alaska. “Narratives set on this part of the coast indicate familiarity with earthquakes, giant waves, floods, and exceptional tides,” writes Julie Cruikshank in her fascinating book Do Glaciers Listen? “They attribute these forces to the activities of Raven, who made the earth at the beginning of time.” George Emmons, the American ethnologist who’d escorted Merriam and Grinnell to visit the Tlingit village in Sitka, recorded the story of Kah Lituya, “a monster of the deep who dwells in the ocean caverns near the entrance” of Lituya Bay. Resentful of anyone who entered his domain, he and his slaves would “grasp the surface water and shake it as if it were a sheet,” engulfing the intruder.

Seismologists have advanced a long way from deep-sea monsters to explain the causes of earthquakes and tsunamis, but they’re still somewhat hamstrung when it comes to determining when such events are going to occur. The Alaska Earthquake Center at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks was founded to monitor seismic activity and reduce “the impacts of earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions in Alaska” after the state was blindsided by the largest quake recorded in U.S. history, the 1964 Good Friday earthquake.

There’s a black-and-white Super 8 film taken by two crewmen aboard the freighter Chena, which docked in Valdez on March 27, 1964. On the waterfront, longshoremen wait with hands in pockets for the unloading to begin, as children scamper with their dogs, waving at deckhands who toss oranges and candy. Then the earth ruptures. A chasm opens in the ocean. Somehow the cameraman keeps filming as the water is sucked out of the harbor, exposing the seafloor. A fifty-foot wave rolls in from the bay and crashes ashore, hurling the Chena into the center of town and pulling away much of the silty ground on which Valdez sits. The dock collapses, taking kids, dogs, and longshoremen into the sea. None of them survive. A visitor to Valdez today is actually seeing a different city, built four miles away from the original.

Mike West is Alaska’s state seismologist, working out of UAF’s Geophysical Institute, a funky complex of buildings with a huge parabolic dish on its roof. We met across the street at the campus’s Museum of the North, which West described, accurately, as “easily the nicest building in Fairbanks.

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