A view of an enormous rock delta from the avalanche of Mount Steller that registered on seismometers all over Alaska. The amount of rock and ice that fell was equal to a pile one mile long, one-third mile wide and 50 yards high.
Posted on 10/02/2005 11:38:47 AM PDT by redpoll
Jackie Caplan-Auerbach was checking earthquake activity around Alaska volcanoes from her Anchorage office on Sept. 14, a routine she performs every day at the Alaska Volcano Observatory, when she noticed a strange seismic signal on Mount Spurr. A large shock to the Earth -- not as abrupt as an earthquake -- had happened somewhere in Alaska. When Caplan-Auerbach saw the odd signal was even stronger on Mount Wrangell, she suspected there was a great avalanche somewhere in the restless corner of Alaska where the Panhandle of Southeast meets the rest of the state. There was.
(Excerpt) Read more at adn.com ...
. A good chunk of Mount Steller, a razorback 10,000-foot peak about 80 miles east of Cordova, had collapsed onto Bering Glacier. Rocks and ice from the mountain tumbled 8,000 vertical feet, spilling out in a chunky black delta that reached six miles from the mountain. Christian Huggel, a Swiss avalanche specialist who happened to be visiting the Alaska Volcano Observatory in Anchorage, estimated that the amount of rock and ice that shook loose was equal to a pile one mile long, one-third mile wide and 50 yards high.Wow, now that's an avelanche....
Thank you for posting this article, redpoll! I read it in the Anchorage Daily News a few days ago and when I tried to find it for my husband yesterday, I couldn't. The first printing of the article also had a picture included of this massive slide. I did find it again this morning on ADN.
Why didn't FEMA rush out to push the slide back up the mountain. What a bunch of failures those folks are!
Exactly.
"Just another insight about how insignificant 2,000 acress of drilling in the Arctic would really be."
Is that all they are talking about drilling in? I had not heard that - it makes the restrictions that much less defensible.
Interesting article -- and a good observation.
Lots of good ANWR info at this link: http://www.anwr.org/
Bush's fault.
In other news, polar bears were seen looting amid the wreckage...
A view of an enormous rock delta from the avalanche of Mount Steller that registered on seismometers all over Alaska. The amount of rock and ice that fell was equal to a pile one mile long, one-third mile wide and 50 yards high.
"Some months back there was a show on TV about another Alaskan landslide (July, 1958) Killer EarthquakeThe magnitude of the quake was about 8.3, although some sources say it was a 7.9, on the Richter Scale ....it "shook" loose an estimated 40 million cubic yards of dirt and glacier from a mountainside at the head of the Bay, When the stuff went "kersploosh" into the water it created a massive wave that washed 1,720 ft/524m high over the headland in the right side of the above picture.... there were no trees left......
...There were human witnesses to the catastrophic event. . ... two boats "rode" the tidal waves as they washed from the source of the landslide and resonated around the bay, like water sloshing in a wash basin. ...To measure the height of the biggest wave, all scientists had to do was look for the high water mark -...
Then, they measured the elevation of the highest point on the high water mark to get a measurement of 1,720 ft/524 high - the biggest wave ever measured.
"In other news, polar bears were seen looting amid the wreckage..."
Too far south for polars - if you see bears here they would be blacks or grizzly.
The real question is: if no one was there to hear it, did it make a sound?
I saw that - the guy and his kid fishing got the ride of their life...
Good post for the choir, redpoll.
"This huge landslide from an unnamed 7,000-foot-high peak in the Alaska Range, less than 10 miles west of the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline, was triggered by the 2002 Denali Fault earthquake. The fault rupture offset the ice of the mile-wide Black Rapids Glacier, in the foreground, which the landslide subsequently covered."
"One of the unique features about the giant avalanche of Sept. 14 on Mount Steller was that perhaps no one saw it or felt it."
If an avalanch happened in Alaska, and nobody was around to notice/hear/feel it, would it have really ever happened?
You found the picture! Thank you!!! Isn't that an amazing slide?
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