It was early morning of August 10, 2025 in Southeast Alaska when there were only a few known people within a few miles of Tracy Arm when Mother Nature decided to show her force and leave a scar on the land.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - In the early morning of August 10, 2025 in Southeast Alaska, only a few people are known to have been within a few miles of Tracy Arm , just South of Juneau , when Mother Nature decided to show her force and leave a scar on the land.
The glacier on the south side would be forever altered that morning by a strong force that was not just the melting it had already been facing., perched on the northern wall of the fjord, would come crashing down on the toe of the glacier just before 5:30 that morning. The sheer force of the land falling into a narrow, deep-water fjord pushed the water far up the wall across from the landslide and created a large tsunami. There were kayakers camping on Harbor Island, an island near the mouth of Tracy Arm. USGS reports the wave swept their gear away. There was at least one person in a nearby fjord, Endicott Arm, when it happened. When the weather cleared, Cyrus Read, a geophysicist with USGS, was one of the first scientists to fly over the landslide and see the aftermath for himself, just days after it happened. “I think we were the first ones to really kind of give an estimate for how high that splash had gone across the bay,” he said. “I think other people had flown around maybe earlier that day because it was the first good weather day and taken photos, but we hadn’t seen them yet. So, we were amongst the first people who had really been up there and looked carefully. We were probably the first to look carefully.” With those attentive eyes, the crew saw how the energy from the landslide and tsunami profoundly changed the land’s anatomy.“In my job with the Alaska Volcano Observatory for 20-something years, I’ve seen a lot of cool things from helicopters, and this was right up there with any of the coolest I’ve seen,” Read said.At the head of Tracy Arm, Read explained, “You couldn’t miss the big chunk of the mountain that had fallen off and kind of landed mostly on the glacier and partially in the water,” he said of the northern side of the fjord. He and the crew on the helicopter had an idea of what they would see on the northern side of the fjord where the land had let go from the rock beneath it, but Read said he had no idea what the southern side of the fjord would look like where the tsunami had inundated. August 2025 Tracy Arm Landslide. The left side of the photo shows the landslide area, and the right side shows where trees were pulled from the ground because of the tsunami.“The wave had run up to 1,500-ish feet. And that, I think, kind of took us aback. We knew that there was likely a splash on the other side, but we didn’t realize how big it was,” he said. “That’s pretty unusual, I think. It doesn’t happen often.”For perspective, when a landslide in Lituya Bay fell into the water in 1958, it created a tsunami with a run-up of about 1,720 feet. That tsunami is considered the world’s tallest. In Tracy Arm, the trees in the water’s powerful path that managed to not be ripped from the ground were forever altered. “We could see where the alders had had all their bark peeled off. And so, we kind of got an estimate for how high up that splash on the opposite side of the landslide was. And that was a really cool thing to see,” Read said. August 2025 Tracy Arm landslide, tsunami aftermath. The bright line near the water shows where trees were pulled from the ground because of the tsunami.And the evidence of the powerful wave was not confined to the fjord wall directly across from the landslide.“You could see the trim line, where how high up the water had run, as you went down the fjord. And then it kind of disappeared towards the mouth of the fjord, except that around the corner in Williams Cove, it was like a bulldozer had gone through to about 80 feet above the sea level at the head of the cove,” he said.“The way that the wave ran up in different places was really interesting. And the extent to which it ran up when it was even pretty far away from the source of the wave itself, that, too, was striking to me because I just didn’t expect that. I kind of thought the wave would be created and then slowly diminish in size. And that’s not how it works,” he said. Seeing how Mother Nature can modify our surroundings in the blink of an eye can be invigorating for some scientists and enthusiasts. “It’s kind of like a big volcanic eruption or something. It’s like you want to see it, but then also too, it’s like you sort of don’t want to see it at the same time,” Read said.“I mean, I hope I don’t have to see it again. I think we really dodged a bullet here, right?” he said. “There are frequent cruise ships up in that area in Tracy Arm. And if one had been there at that time, it could have been a real problem.” The concern of landslides over and near melting glaciers in Alaska has grown in recent years. Some of those masses of rock have been identified and are slowly sliding, but still holding onto the mountain side, like those inThere’s no solid timeline on when those masses could fall into the water, and scientists don’t know whether it will be in a worst-case scenario. There’s been a push for more research over the past few years and could be considered a “young study” in some respects. “I think it’s a really important topic, and it’s something that we’re going to continue to see,” he said of the large, deep-seated landslides like the one in Tracy Arm but also the shallow, smaller landslides like the recent deadly ones in Southeast Alaska over the past few years, which have often been triggered by rainfall. Read said he has heard the sentiment that “every natural disaster comes with a side dish of landslides.” “I kind of like that analogy, whether it’s an earthquake that can trigger landslides, you have big rain events that triggers landslides. Volcanoes erupting can have big sector collapses like in Mount St. Helens. So, I like that concept that landslides are a side dish to every other natural disaster that happens,” he said. When asked what he thinks is the most important thing for scientists right now when it comes to landslides, Read’s first response was “hazard mapping.” “Knowing the history of where landslides have happened, to know where there’s risk is a very important aspect of this,” he said. “The Tracy Arm landslide produced a series of small seismic events in advance of it happening that were recorded in Juneau and Sitka. So, it does seem like, perhaps, with a large event like this, you could detect it in advance if you had a density of seismometers and enough people watching,” he said. “I think that we have a lot of work to do on the landslide side. There’s a lot to learn, but it’s also a difficult thing to instrument and alert in real time for.”He thinks it is important for this event particularly, but also for similar scenarios, to better understand how tsunamis work and why some areas had higher run-up than others in places some might not expect, like he noticed with the Williams Cove area. “What causes that? Why does it sort of jump out of the ocean in this place, but not this place?” he said. That information could be used to help people decide their risk-to-benefit ratio for recreation in areas where there are known landslides. “What I saw in Tracy Arm was that, at the head of these coves, it kind of amplifies the energy coming out of the ocean. So, if you’re going to camp somewhere and you’re like at the apex where it shallows and pinches into a bay or something, maybe that’s a more risky place,” he said. “But what are your odds of an event like that happening at the moment that you’re out there? Very low.”“We get this with earthquakes and volcanoes, too,” he said. “It could happen between tomorrow and 10,000 years from now. It’s hard to know.”“I think more from volcanoes, but also from an event like this, you really realize that the Earth is dynamic. It changes all the time. It feels solid and stationary to us, but it’s not,” he said. “This just reinforced that.”‘Like a jet blasted you in the face’: 85 mph Arctic storm winds trap 150 people at Alaska basketball tournamentBangladeshi man arrested on charges of operating ‘child sexual exploitation’ ring in Alaska
Tsunami Tracy Arm Endicott Arm Juneau
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