Alaska Earthquake of 1964

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1:43Chuck Bryant:Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know about earthquakes in Alaska in 1964. 64, I'm going to talk like this. Oh, no. The rest of the podcast, what do you think? I think that 60 % of the people just stopped listening. Well, they are going to be sorry because this is going to be an interesting episode. Yeah, this is, you know, I had no idea how earthquake-prone Alaska is, was and is, until doing this kind of research. Oh, I was raised on that knowledge. My family talked about it a lot. No comment. In Toledo. Hey, Chuck, I have a question.

2:28Chuck Bryant:Will you ask me the first time I was ever in an earthquake or ever felt an earthquake? When's the first time you ever felt an earthquake? Yesterday. Chuck, will you ask me a follow-up question? Will you ask what I was reading while I experienced that first earthquake? Well, where were you and what were you reading? I was reading this article about the Alaska earthquake of 1964, and I was at home. Wow. I didn't know that you guys felt a tremor. There was one in Cuba, like a 6.8, and I felt it in central Florida plain as day. Wow. I've never, I lived in L.A. for five years, and I never felt a single anything.

3:09Yeah.

3:10Chuck Bryant:I pretty much assumed I would go the rest of my life without feeling an earthquake, and nope. Nope. Cuba had other ideas. Yeah, well, I mean, after reading about how, like, far away, like, there's some pretty startling stuff in this episode, like, as far as how far away you could feel things and, like, the upset that it caused, like, around the world. It's nuts. Yeah, a lot of people were upset about this, for sure. All right. Well, we're talking about the Good Friday earthquake of 1964 in Alaska, which at the time was the biggest, well, the second largest ever in the world that they had recorded at 9.2, just behind the 9.5 that hit Chile in 1960.

3:57Yeah. And considering the devastation that happened in Alaska, and probably only because it happened in Alaska, it only killed 131 people, which is a lot. But I think the earthquake itself in Alaska, how many people? It's like 15 people, maybe?

4:16Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I think there was actually in the whole state something like. No, no, no. I'm saying how many people it killed was only. Oh, sorry. I thought you were saying how many people lived in Alaska. No, just like the literal earthquake of people in Alaska. I think it was like, yeah, 15 or 16 people. That was it from the actual earthquake. Yeah. I wonder why you laughed. Yeah, that was why, because I thought you were making a joke, and I thought it was hilarious. So let's get to it, eh? Well, there was one other big thing about this earthquake besides just the massiveness. I mean, 9.5, that is awfully close to as high as you can go on the Richter scale, right?

4:51Yeah, 9.2 was this one, yeah.

4:52Chuck Bryant:9.2. Sorry, Chile was the 9.5. Still, nothing to sneeze at, right? Second largest earthquake on record. One of the other reasons that it's important or significant is because it basically opened up the door for seismology and our understanding of earthquakes and tsunamis. And basically, everything we know about those things today kind of kicked off with this 1964 earthquake because we were able to, like, go study it. It happened at just the right time, in a sense. Yeah, for sure. And this was a megathrust earthquake. And as it turns out, the most destructive kind of earthquake that the world knows is the megathrust.

5:3210 out of the 10 of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded have been megathrust. megathrust and that is where and you know we've talked about this in the earthquakes episode as well as um other ones probably the japanese tsunami one as well sure um but this uh megathrust earthquake is what happens when you have two tectonic plates um hitting one another and in the case of the megathrust the heavier one slides below the lighter one and that heavier uh plate just dives into the mantle. It's, you know, we talked about subduction a lot, but it subduces.

6:09Chuck Bryant:Right. Yeah, it's subdued by the top one, right? And as it goes further and further in, like the whole Earth's crust gets recycled over incredible spans of time. The problem is what causes a megathrust earthquake is that in some places, that subdued plate doesn't go down. It locks with the plate on top when they converge, and they just press and press and press and press. And then eventually one of them is going to give. It's like a game of chicken or something like that. And when they give, it just slips and it slips really quickly. And an entire region of Earth suddenly lurches forward like 50 feet.

6:49Chuck Bryant:And when that happens, that's where you get like 10 out of the 10 most powerful earthquakes. That's where they come from. They're all megathrust earthquakes and that's how they're produced. That's right. The one in 64 in Alaska was at the Alaska Aleutian subduction zone. And that's where the plates here in North America slide over the Pacific plates is where they meet one another. And I think it runs from the Gulf of Alaska. And as we'll see, the epicenter was kind of right there on the waterfront almost. But it runs along the Gulf of Alaska to Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. Which is an island in Russia.

7:32That's right.

7:34Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it's basically like the worst place to live. But at the time when people were settling along Alaska, Seward and what was the other big city that was affected by this? Anchorage. And then a bunch of other slightly smaller cities. They didn't know that the subduction zone existed. It's nothing you can walk up to and point to. This thing exists under the oceans offshore. So they didn't know. But they found out in a big way after this earthquake that, oh, yeah, actually, there's a subduction zone. And as a matter of fact, the whole theory of plate tectonics is correct. This was another thing that it proved or showed.

8:12Yeah. So, you know, you said that that can happen really quickly. That's kind of what happens with these megathrust earthquakes and why they're so kind of spectacular is that the speed at which it happens. And then in this case, just like how much was moving. They said that the plates move, they estimate, between 30 to 60 feet, kind of all at the same time. And the area that moved, this is staggering, was 500 miles by 125 miles.

8:43Chuck Bryant:Suddenly moved 60 feet, like, in seconds. Yeah, it's just, yeah, it's hard to believe. Right. And so again, like this 500 by 125 mile chunk, Anchorage, Valdez, sorry, Valdez, Seward, and a bunch of other towns are like on that chunk of land that suddenly lurched forward. So not only did the land lurch, this earthquake just had all sorts of crazy effects, in part because the earthquake itself, 9.2, lasted for like four minutes. Four minutes of a 9.2 earthquake sounds terrifying and crazy destructive. Yeah, this was on March 27th of that year. About 5.36 p.m. is when it kicked off. And, you know, when I talked about, like, how far reaching it was, here are some, like, pretty startling examples.

9:40There were water level changes registered across every United States state except for Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware. and when you see things like a well or a pond sloshing back and forth, like water that doesn't normally move around is being moved, those are called seash waves, and those were reported as far away as Australia and South Africa.

10:05Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Can't you see some little Australian kid going, Pa! The pond's moving! That's a good Australian kid. Yeah, I thought so too. So those, what do you call them, seash waves? I call them seaswaves. Seashwaves. Okay, so in the Gulf, the Gulf of Mexico, fishing boats sank off Louisiana because those seaswaves sloshing back and forth in the Gulf of Mexico was so potent that it swamped some boats and sank them. In the Gulf of Mexico, which is nowhere near Alaska. Yeah, it swayed the space needle. And by the way, you maybe have been reading too much German on the show because I think it probably would be Seish in German.

10:48Chuck Bryant:Yeah, something happened. My brain, like, just ticked into just enough German that I mispronounce stuff a lot now. Well, I may be wrong, too, because maybe it's a German word. I have no idea. Well, let's spell it for everybody, and then the listeners can make up for themselves how to pronounce it. Shall we? I'll take the first letter. You take the second. We'll just alternate like that. S-E-I-C-H-E-E-E-E. Waves. Just want to get the end. Yeah, that thing rocked the Space Needle, which is about 1 ,000 miles away. And they did, you know, geological surveys afterward. They showed some parts of the coast were close to 40 feet higher than they used to be.

11:31Other parts were, you know, up to 8 feet lower than they used to be. It literally changed the coastline of Alaska as much as 50 feet in some parts. And this is like, you know, this is the kind of thing you think of when you think of an earthquake like in a movie. Like, you know, train tracks getting curled up and telephone lines snapping like toothpicks and cars being sucked into the earth.

11:53Chuck Bryant:This is the kind of thing that presents a challenge to the rock. Yeah, exactly. Only he could save us. Exactly. Unfortunately, he was just a little tyke if he was even born at this time. So he couldn't help anybody. One of the things that just fascinates me is that there were entire swaths of forest on the coastline that dropped into the ocean. Not like, oh, the land's caving in and all these trees are like falling over down into the ocean. The entire stretch of forest, still standing upright, just plunged downward into the ocean and was covered by the water. It just dropped. And that to me just is crazy fascinating.

12:36Chuck Bryant:Like anything underwater I find fascinating, but also the idea of that happening like that suddenly is just mind-boggling to me. Anything underwater is fascinating? Anything that's not supposed to be underwater that is underwater. Ah, okay. Have you seen The Drowned House? I don't think so. It's like a found footage, but it's actually good found footage. It's an indie film where these scuba divers are exploring this house that was like at the bottom of a reservoir. Okay. So it's now underwater. And just that alone is awesome. But the plot's pretty cool, too. So I recommend it. It's scary. You're going deep with your horror.

13:17Chuck Bryant:I mean, there's just so much bad horror out there that you really have to hunt. Yeah. And I didn't mean that to be a pun, by the way. Going deep with the horror? Yeah, underwater. Oh, wow. Yeah, that German part of me, I'm taking everything quite literally. There's no such thing as anything funny. You know, we're going to talk a lot about the effects of the water because, again, some pretty devastating and remarkable stuff happened. I was right. It was only about 15 people were killed from the actual earthquake. Most of the people died in the tsunamis that followed. Right. There was one big one and a lot of smaller ones.

13:58I think the big one reached a wave, reached a height of about 200 feet, which is incredible to think about. It, you know, as far south as California, like 12 people died in California from an earthquake that happened in Alaska.

14:15Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it went southward. It also went westward, went right past Hawaii, all the way to Japan. It had kind of petered out by the time it hit Japan. But, I mean, like, that's a long way for a single wave to travel. I mean, 200 feet, that's just nuts, right? Yeah, that's a big wave. It is. It's a giant. So with a tsunami, though, you have a really long time. You kind of have some warning. After an earthquake, you can expect, if you're along the coast, that a tsunami is probably coming. So you can get away from that. The problem was is that all sorts of different towns and communities along the coast got swamped, like almost immediately with tsunamis.

14:57Chuck Bryant:Not 200-foot tsunamis, but still enough to like wreck an entire town. And that was another thing that kind of the science finally got to the bottom of. But in some of these tsunamis, like for example, there's a village called Chinega. And four minutes after the earthquake, it just got washed away. There were 68 people who lived there. 23 of them died. And the only thing that survived, as far as their buildings are concerned, was the schoolhouse, which was built on higher ground, 100 feet above sea level. So, like, everything else in the town was just gone thanks to a tsunami that hit, like, lightning fast.

15:35Yeah, I've got one for everyone here. Valdez, at Port Valdez, they were, you know, everything kind of along the coastline there was obviously swept into the ocean. And 32 people very sadly passed in Valdez. And it ended up catching on fire the oil tankers and stuff that were there. And then those were brought out to sea. So, like, you talk about a movie, like oil tankers on fire in a wave being transported across the ocean.

16:07Chuck Bryant:Yeah, for sure. And then one of the other problems with Port Valdez was that the town was built on sand and gravel, not bedrock. And one of the things about a megathrust earthquake is it liquefies the soil. It turns what seemed to be totally solid ground into essentially a liquid and it can swallow stuff up like almost immediately. So huge parts of that town were also swallowed up by the earth all of a sudden. Like this is biblical end times kind of stuff, you know? Yeah. And, you know, at the risk of just going on and on, I got one more, I think. And then we can probably take a break. But if you're talking about Anchorage, you know, the biggest city there that got, you know, in Alaska at least, that got hit.

16:52There was a landslide because it also triggered landslides. We should have mentioned that. And the entire business district sank about nine feet. There were some building collapses, to be sure. But others just, kind of like the forest, just dropped, like, you know, anywhere from 9 to 20 feet below ones that were just on the other side of the street. Did you see photos of that? Oh, yeah. Life Magazine has a, I mean, there's a ton of good photos online that are just kind of hard to wrap your head around, like what you're looking at sometimes.

17:21Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it takes a second for sure. Like one of those 3DI posters, but with earthquake stuff instead. We did a whole episode on those. We did. And if I remember correctly, that was pretty interesting. Yeah, the magic eye thing. You want to take that break you mentioned? Yeah, we'll take a break and talk about sort of what happened after, right after this.

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19:35Chuck Bryant:so four minutes later um the earthquake stops but there's still tsunamis there's fires at sea even like whole towns have collapsed like it it takes a little while for the dust to finally settle um when it does i think like the next day lyndon johnson who was president at the time said Alaska as a whole is a major disaster area. Remember I said like telephone poles snapped and there were no roads anymore or railroads. That meant that people couldn't communicate with the outside world. So if you had family and friends outside of Alaska and they heard about this earthquake, they couldn't get in touch with you and you couldn't get in touch with them.

20:17Chuck Bryant:So it was a very hairy time for a lot of people until they could find out whether their loved ones were alive or not. And I think that damage is something like$3 billion in today's dollars. Which, again, like this is a state with like a population of, I think, 250 ,000 people at the time. Like it was not populated at all. But that's how much damage that earthquake did still. Yeah. They had to, you know, I mentioned earlier that it changed the shape of Alaska and its coastline. And it was so drastic that they had to kind of redraw the shipping lanes and say, like, hey, like, you can't go that way anymore because of this.

20:57And they had to kind of, you know, redraw all of that area. Some people were, you know, Alaska strong. So we're not leaving. We're going to build on top of where we were. Other people said, you know what, I'm going to go higher. Entire towns were gone and then popped up in other places. and Valdez is a great example because the Army Corps of Engineers came in and said, you know, Josh Clark one day will say that this was built on a gravel foundation. So you shouldn't even rebuild there. And there were only about 500, you know, plus or minus people living there at the time. And they said, you got three years to get out of here.

21:35We got a new Valdez for you about four miles away. And that's generally what happened. People left, set up the new town of Valdez, which now has close to 4 ,000 people. And they burned the rest of what was there down just to make sure that people didn't kind of like set up and squat there.

21:54Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it's kind of cool. You can go hike the old Valdez town. There's an intersection still of the two main drags. And I think like there's the street sign up still. And then they have plaques showing what used to be where. It looks like a pretty cool hike. Yeah. So, Chuck, we talked about how this kind of changed science. I think we should really kind of expand on that because it really changed science, Chuck. Yeah. And, you know, this next part we need to thank specifically. I think Livia used a Smithsonian Magazine article by Christian Elliott for this part. So big thanks to Christian Elliott for all the hard work.

22:34And Livia. Well, of course, and Livia always. She's our North Star, after all. But, you know, we've already kind of said it, but I guess more specifically, we should say that, you know, at this time in 1964, the idea of what we knew about plate tectonics was not, you know, entrenched. Like, people kind of had a good idea of what they thought was going on. For a long time, people had been checking out maps and saying, like, hey, I think that this used to be connected right here, and maybe things drifted apart. But it was still sort of being actively debated at the time. And this really kind of like laid bare like, yeah, this is not a hypothesis anymore.