Alaska is home to breathtaking fjords, massive glaciers and a lot of mountainous nooks and crannies where nobody lives.
Luckily, they didn’t have to start from scratch. Since the Good Friday Earthquake wreaked havoc 60 years ago this week, the state and other agencies have installed hundreds of seismometers that detect earthquakes and all kinds of geologic movement. The prototype taps into that existing network. Seismic signals can be read on a graph of vibrations over time. Most earthquakes happen briefly, just a few seconds. That motion creates what’s known as a short-period wave.
“Once they retreat, these steep fjords we have all over coastal Alaska are losing their support,” Karasözen said. “If they were to fail — these slopes — they would fall into the water body and could trigger a tsunami that we wouldn’t know about.”Barry’s Arm in Prince William Sound is probably the most well known example of this phenomenon. The steep face of the fjord, which was once buttressed by the retreating Barry Glacier,hit nearby communities like Whittier within 20 minutes.