The island mountains and valleys of Alaska’s panhandle may look unchanging, but the area is moving rapidly in a geologic sense. KSTK's Sage Smiley sat down with a USGS geologist to talk about the deepest history of Southeast.
“Then it moved around, and then it had collisions with other little pieces and chunks, and then finally, really got crunched up against the North American margin probably in Cretaceous time,” Haeussler explains. “It would have been during the time of the big meat-eating dinosaurs or maybe a little before.
“In some ways, the Queen Charlotte is like the San Andreas but it’s on steroids: it moves a lot faster. It’s exceedingly sharp. It’s produced more big earthquakes in a shorter period of time,” Haeussler says, “So it’s a very impressive fault system.” The glacial history of Southeast is also unique. With tons and tons of ice sitting on top of what’s now the Inside Passage, the land got forced down, while on the Outer Coast, it buckled upwards.
Haeussler says geology was what first drew him to Alaska. He first visited for a geology field camp while in undergrad at Michigan State. While Southeast residents can’t usually sit and watch rocks move, there are consequences for communities living in geologically tumultuous zones. For example, the fast-moving Queen Charlotte – Fairweather Fault poses major potential seismic hazards to people living in Southeast.
Landslides, both on land and in the water, can trigger massive tsunamis with potentially devastating effects. Haeussler says the majority of fatalities from the 1964 magnitude 9.2 earthquake in the Prince William Sound were from tsunamis generated by underwater landslides, not from the earthquake itself.
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