Geologist George Plafker studied villages and unoccupied islands in Prince William Sound after the 9.2 earthquake in 1964. His work helped prove the existence of the subduction zone that causes many earthquakes off the coast of Alaska.
George Plafker holds up a photo of uplifted Alaska shorelines he took after visiting the southern coast following the March 1964 magnitude 9.2 earthquake. Plafker was standing in his office in Menlo Park, California, when this photo was taken in 2013.
It was, of course, the second-strongest earthquake in the era of instruments able to measure them, one that would change the direction of Plafker’s career and what people thought about great earthquakes on the Pacific basin’s Ring of Fire. On the initial trip a few days after the earthquake, two of his colleagues focused on Anchorage and Alaska’s road system. Plafker caught military helicopter rides and flew in Bush planes to villages and unoccupied islands in Prince William Sound. He covered much of that country with Jim Osborne, a pilot for Cordova Airlines, who took Plafker to what was left of some villages on Osborne’s mail route.
The earthquake-caused wave at Chenega Bay, which Plafker attributed to a small group of nearby islands focusing the onrushing water, was one example of the water displaced by the great earthquake. More than 100 people died in Alaska and others as far south as Oregon when tsunamis rushed down the west coast of the U.S. and Canada.
“The whole of Prince William Sound looked like that,” he said, holding a photo that shows a pale band on shoreline rocks. “You could really see these critters knew exactly where they should be. If they got a little too high, they were dead.”
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