The year saw “slightly higher than average” seismic activity, according to the Alaska Earthquake Center.
The state’s largest quake was the magnitude 7.3 Sand Point Earthquake on July 16. The year saw “slightly higher than average” seismic activity, according to the Alaska Earthquake Center.
Out of the about 35,000 quakes that the Alaska Earthquake Center detected throughout the year, Alaska saw about 2,220 quakes that were magnitude 3 and above, Elisabeth Nadin, a geologist with the Alaska Earthquake Center said.
“That’s actually significantly above 2024, where we had closer to 1,600 earthquakes above a magnitude three. Another comparison though, could be a noteworthy year like 2018,” she said. That year had two very large earthquakes. One was a magnitude 7.9 on January 23 in Kodiak.
The other was the November 30 magnitude 7.1 near Anchorage. In 2025, about 70 of the detected quakes were magnitude 5 and above.
“A magnitude 5 earthquake is definitely felt by anyone near it. And in a lot of places in the world, it actually can cause widespread damage,” she said. The magnitude 8.8 Kamchatka Earthquake on July 29 was the largest in the world in 2025, and while it was not in Alaska, many here felt the impact as a tsunami warning and wave spread across the Pacific Ocean. The tsunami waves hit multiple Alaskan communities.
“We have a tsunami modeler on staff, and she got right to modeling what was the maximum wave height that would hit parts of Alaska. And the Western part of Aleutians is right in the path of that tsunami,” Nadin said. She looked at the way the earthquake ruptured and at the bathymetry, which is the topography of the ocean’s floor that can indicate how a tsunami moves across the ocean, she said.
“Using that information, she tracked it and modeled a wave height of about three feet in Adak. And that actually matched with the wave height measurements that were on the ground in Adak after that tsunami reached them,” Nadin said.
“The amount of energy that’s carried by it, from the seafloor to the top of wave is quite high. Even a one-foot tsunami can cause destruction in the harbor,” Nadin said. A massive amount of land fell off the fjord wall and into the deep waters of Tracy Arm creating a tsunami that went about 1,600 feet up the wall on the other side of the fjord.
That wave rivals the size of the world’s tallest recorded tsunami, which pushed water about 1,720 feet up the fjord wall of Lituya Bay, Alaska in 1958. By the time the Tracy Arm tsunami hit Juneau, which is about 50 miles north of the landslide, the wave was down to only about one foot, Nadin said.new landslide detections system , which is in the test phase.
Despite this landslide being out of even the newly expanded area, the center was the first to use seismic data to say when the landslide happened and how big it was, Nadin said.
“I think what’s really interesting about the outcome of that is that a couple of major cruise lines that visit Alaska have removed Tracy Arm from their agenda for the summer of 2026. They’ll still go into Endicott Arm, but they’re not going to go into Tracy Arm,” Nadin said.
“We were somewhat lucky because, happening so early in the morning, I think it was something like close to 5 a.m., there weren’t any cruise ships in the area,” Nadin said. “But if there had been, we’d be looking at a very different scenario. ” She said it is so important to detect landslides and know it had generated a tsunami because of the concern one could wipe out a coastal community, Nadin said.
“If we can detect a landslide that falls into the water quickly, then people in a coastal community that’s nearby would have time to get to higher ground,” she said. “The Tracy Arm Landslide in 2025, it was something that was big. It was something that indicated that we have this capacity to do a remote detection of a landslide. It was something that somewhat safely reminded us of the hazards in coastal Alaska,” Nadin said.
“It was a reminder that, we know, but we know increasingly that coastal Alaska is at risk for these large landslides that can lead to tsunamis. ” While it was not an earthquake, it is still considered a seismic event.
When the land fell away from the wall of the fjord, it created a signal that seismic stations picked up, much like an earthquake,, which happened on July 16 and generated a tsunami warning, but no notable wave, according to the Alaska Earthquake Center.
“Alaska’s largest earthquake of 2025 was on July 16, within a cluster of five notable earthquakes above magnitude 7 in the same spot since 2020,” the Earthquake Center said. “They’re pretty interesting because they’re filling in what used to be considered a seismic gap, or kind of a spot in between where other really large earthquakes had ruptured in the past,” Nadin said. “That’s larger, so you wouldn’t necessarily consider that to be an aftershock.
Each one of these really large ones has its own cluster of aftershocks,” Nadin said. Nadin said it is interesting, but coincidental, that there have been five large quakes in the same area that happen to be in July and October.
“It’s like a coincidence, but it’s an interesting coincidence. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily like scientifically really noteworthy, but from an observational standpoint, it’s interesting,” she said. Nadin said she thinks it was the year’s most widely felt quake.
“It was very widely felt, in part because it was quite deep,“ she said. ”I wouldn’t say unusually deep, but for a magnitude 6 earthquake, that could be pretty destructive. But because it was deep, it wasn’t quite as destructive, but that also meant that the shaking was felt over a much wider area," she said.
It was felt stronger and longer in the Cook Inlet area because it is filled with sediment, which shakes a lot during earthquakes, she said. It was felt a little less intensely west of Susitna. The seismicity in the area of the 2018 quake returned to background levels after the M7.1 in 2024, Nadin said.
Nadin said it was technically in Canada, but it was under the Hubbard Glacier near the border with Alaska.started gently and then remained strong until the quake was over.
“I initially thought maybe something was going on in the house. Maybe the kids were active or something like that, but then it kept going,” Valle told Alaska’s News Source in December.
“In the time it took me to get up and walk to the other room, we started having sort of a major shake start taking place. ”“The USGS mapped about 700 different locations that had characteristics that were consistent with some sort of either landslide or snow avalanche,” USGS Research Geophysicist Kate Allstadt told Alaska’s News Source in December.
“Luckily it was in a remote area, again, out of the way of harm for most people. But, a reminder that large earthquakes in Alaska, in our area, can trigger landslides, can trigger avalanches,” Nadin said. The January 29 magnitude 5.2 near McGrath was notable because it was in an area that doesn’t have notable earthquakes.
“It hadn’t had an earthquake above magnitude 5 since 1935,” Nadin said. “And that one was a really interesting event scientifically because it actually validated a sense of motion on a fault in the area that, like, that fault hadn’t ruptured in, in history, for hundreds of years or so. ”“It’s actually, I think, somewhat famous for being near the kind of proposed Pebble Mine site. And, and people want to know if it’s seismically active or not.
It definitely historically has been seismically active, but it hasn’t had a notable earthquake for quite some time,” she said. She said this quake was interesting because it indicates the fault is likely active in the southwest extent of the fault, where the quake happened.
“I’ve talked to some people after that event, and they were talking about the odd placement of their Halloween decorations that could have come crashing down during earthquakes. ”Five people shot, two hospitalized in East AnchorageMultiple people rescued from avalanche on Flattop Mountain
Alaska Alaska Earthquake Center Tsunami Landslide Kamchatka Tracy Arm Landslide Tracy Arm Chignik Sand Point Simeonof Thanksgiving Quake Hubbard Glacier Halloween Magrath Bruin Bay Fault
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