July 2, 2026 • 36 mins
When a 9.2 quake shoook Alaska in 1964 it was the 2nd largest earthquake ever recorded. This is that story.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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 nineteen sixty four.
I'm going to talk like this, Oh the rest of
the podcast. What do you think?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
I think that sixty percent of the people just stop listening.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Well, they are going to be sorry, because this is
going to be an interesting episode.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Yeah, this is you know, I had no idea how
earthquake prone Alaska is was and is until doing this
kind of research.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Oh. I was raised on that knowledge. My family talked
about it a lot.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
No comment in Toledo.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Hey, Chuck, I have a question. Will you ask me
the first time I was ever in an earthquake or
ever felt in earthquake?
Speaker 1 (01:01):
When's the first time you ever felt to earthquake?
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Yesterday? Chuck? Will you ask me a follow up question?
Ask what I was reading while I experienced that first earthquake?
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Well, where were you and what were you reading?
Speaker 2 (01:15):
I was reading this article about Alaska earth the Alaska
earthquake of nineteen sixty four, and I was at home.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Wow, I didn't know that you guys felt a trimmer.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
There was one in Cuba, like a six point eight,
and I felt it in Central Florida, plain a day.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Wow, I've never I lived in LA for five years
and I never felt a single anything.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah. I pretty much assumed I would go the rest
of my life with that feeling an earthquake, and nope, nope.
Cuba had other ideas.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
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 could feel things, and
like the upset that it caused like around the world,
it's nuts.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Yeah, a lot of people were upset about this for sure.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
All Right, Well, we're talking about the Good Friday earthquake
of nineteen sixty four in Alaska, which at the time
was the biggest, well the second largest ever in the
world that they had recorded at nine point two, just
behind the nine point five that hit Chile in nineteen sixty. Yeah,
(02:25):
and considering the devastation that happened in Alaska, and probably
only because it happened in Alaska, it only killed one
hundred and thirty one people, which is a lot. But
I think the earthquake itself in Alaska. How many people
It's like fifteen people.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Maybe, yeah, I think there was actually in the whole
state something like.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
No, no, no, I'm saying how many people it killed?
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Was only oh oh, sorry, I thought you're saying how
many people lived in Alaska.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
No, just like the literal earthquake of people in Alaska.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
I think it was like, yeah, fifteen or sixteen people.
That was it from the actual earthquake. Yeah, I wonder
why he laughed. Yeah, that was why, because I thought
you were making a joke and I thought it was hilarious.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
So let's get to today.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Well, there was one other big thing about this earthquake
besides just the massiveness. I mean, nine point five that
is awfully close to as high as you can go
on the Richter scale.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Right, yeah, nine point two was this one? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Nine point two? Sorry, Chili was the nine point five
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
(03:42):
with this nineteen sixty four earthquake because we were able
to like go study it. It happened at just the
right time in a.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Sense, Yeah, for sure. And this was a mega thrust earthquake.
And as it turns out, the most destructive kind of
earthquake that the world knows is the mega thrust. Out
of the ten of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded have
been mega thrust. And that is where and you know,
we've talked about this in the Earthquakes episode as well
(04:09):
as other ones, probably the Japanese tsunami one as well. Sure,
but this mega thrust earthquake is what happens when you
have two tectonic plates hitting one another, and the case
of the mega thrust, the heavier one slides below the
lighter one, and that heavier plate just dives into the mantle.
(04:31):
It's you know, we talked about subduction a lot, but
it subduces.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
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
(04:59):
just press, impressed 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 the entire,
an entire region of Earth suddenly lurches forward like fifty feet.
And when that happens, that's where you get like ten
(05:20):
out of the ten most powerful earthquakes. That's where they
come from. They're all mega thrust earthquakes, and that's how
they're produced.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
That's right. The one in sixty four in Alaska was
at the Alaska Aleutian Subduction Zone, and that's where the
plates here in North America side 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,
(05:53):
but it runs along the Gulf of Alaska to Russia's
Kamchatka Peninsula.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Which is an island in Russia.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
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.
(06:23):
This thing exists under the oceans off shore. 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.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Yeah, so you know, you said that that can happen
really quickly. That's kind of what happens with these mega
thrust 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 was moving. They
said that the plates moved they estimate between thirty to
six defeat kind of all at the same time, and
(07:03):
that the area that moved, this is staggering, was five
hundred miles by one hundred and twenty five.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Miles suddenly moved sixty feet like in seconds.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Yeah, it's just yeah, it's hard to believe, right.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
And so again, like this five hundred by one hundred
and twenty five 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
(07:39):
of crazy effects, in part because the earthquake itself, nine
point two, lasted for like four minutes. Yeah, four minutes
of a nine point two earthquake sounds terrifying and crazy destructive.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Yeah. This was on March twenty seventh of that year,
at about five thirty six pm is when it kicked
out off. And you know when I talked about like
how far reaching it was. Here are some like pretty
startling examples. There were water level changes registered across every
United State state except for Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware.
(08:16):
And when you see things like a well or a
pond slashing back and forth, like water that doesn't normally
move around is being moved, those are called seashwaves. And
those were reported as far away as Australia and South Africa.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Yeah, can't you see some little Australian can go a
paw the pond's moving.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
It's a good Australian kid.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Yeah, I thought so too. So those what'd you call
them seiche waves?
Speaker 1 (08:46):
I called them siashwaves, seashwaves.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Okay, So in the Gulf, the Gulf of Mexico, fishing
boats sank off Louisiana because those seishewaves slashing back and
forth in the Gulf of Mexico was so potent so
that it swamped some boats and sank them in the
Gulf of Mexico, which is nowhere near Alaska.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
Yeah, it swayed the space needle. And by the way,
you maybe had been reading too much of German on
the show, because I think it probably would be siche
in German.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Yeah, something happened my brain like just ticked into just
enough German that I mispronounced stuff a lot.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Now, well I may be wrong too, but because maybe
it's a German word, I have no idea.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Okay, s E C H.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
E E E waves.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Just want to get the end. Yeah, that thing rocked
the space Needle, which is about a thousand miles away.
And they did, you know, geological surveys afterward. They showed
some parts of the coast were close to forty feet
higher than they used to be. Other parts were, you know,
a to eight feet lower than they used to be.
It literally changed the coastline of Alaska as much as
(10:07):
fifty 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.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
This is the kind of thing that presents a challenge
to the rock.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
Yeah, exactly, only he could save us, exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Unfortunately he was just a little tike 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 forests on the coastline that
dropped into the ocean, not like oh, the lands caving
in and all these these trees are like falling over
(10:48):
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. I like anything underwater I
find fascinating, but also the idea of that happening like
(11:08):
that suddenly is just mind boggling to me.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Anything underwater's fascinating.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Anything that's not supposed to be underwater that is underwater.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Ah.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Okay, have you seen the Drowned House?
Speaker 1 (11:22):
I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
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,
so it's now underwater, and just that alone is awesome,
But the plot's pretty cool too.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
So you're going deep with your horror.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
I mean, there's just so much bad horror out there
that you really have to hunt.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Yeah, and I didn't mean that to be a pun.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
By the way, going deep with the horror, yeah underwater?
Oh oh yeah, German part of me, I'm taking everything
quite literally. There's no such thing as anything funny.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
You know, we're going to talk a lot about the
effects of the water, because again it's some pretty like
devastating and remarkable stuff happened. I was right, It was
only about fifteen 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.
I think the big one reached a wave reached a
(12:28):
height of about two hundred feet, which is incredible to
think about it. You know, as far south as California,
like twelve people died in California from an earthquake that
happened in Alaska.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Yeah, I went southward. It also went westward, went right
past Hawaii all the way to Japan. It it 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 two hundred feet that's just nuts.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Right, Yeah, this is a big wave.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
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, not two
(13:25):
hundred foot tsunamis, but still enough to like reck 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 Chenega, and four minutes after the earthquake, it just
got washed away. There were sixty eight people who live there,
(13:46):
twenty three 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 one hundred feet above
sea level. So like everything else in the town was
just gone thanks to a tsunami that hit like lightning fast.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Yeah, I've got one for everyone here. Valdis, at Port Valdiz,
they were, you know, everything kind of along the coastline.
There was obviously swept into the ocean. Thirty two people
very sadly passed in Valdiese and it ended up catching
on fire, the oil tankers and stuff that were there,
(14:24):
and then those were brought out to see so like
you talk about a movie like oil tankers on fire
in a wave being transported across the ocean.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
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 Omega Thrust 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.
(14:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
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, an Alaska at least that got hit.
There was a landslide because it also triggered landslides. We
should have mentioned that, and the entire business district sank
(15:26):
about nine feet. There were some building collapses, to be sure,
but others just look kind of like the forest just dropped,
like you know, anywhere from nine to twenty feet below
ones that were just on the other side of the street.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Did you see photos of that?
Speaker 1 (15:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Yeah, it takes a section for sure, like one of
those three d I posters, but with earthquake stuff instead.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
We did a whole episode on those.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
We did, and if I remember correctly, that was pretty interesting.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Yeah, the magic I think.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
You want to take that break you mentioned.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Yeah, we'll take a break and talk about sort of
what happened after right after this.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
So four minutes later, the earthquake stops, but there's still tsunamis,
there's fires at sea, even like whole towns of collapse,
Like it takes a little while for the dust to
finally settle. When it does, I think, like the next day,
Lyndon Johnson, who was president at the time, said, Alaska
(16:52):
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
(17:13):
touch with them. 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 three billion dollars in
today's dollars. Yeah, which again, like this is a state
with like a population of I think two hundred and
fifty thousand people at the time, Like it was not
populated at all, but that's how much damage that earthquake did.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Still, Yeah, they had to you know, I mentioned earlier
that it changed the shape of Alaska and its coastline.
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, and they
had to kind of, you know, redraw all of that area.
(17:58):
Some people were, you know, Alaska strong, so we're not leaving.
We're gonna 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 Valdis is a great example because the Army Corps
of Engineers came in and said, you know, Josh Clark
(18:19):
one day will say that this was built on a
gravel foundation, so you shouldn't even rebuild there. And there
were only about five hundred, you know, plus or minus
people living there at the time, and they said, you
got three years to get out of here. We got
a new Valdis for you about four miles away, and
that's generally what happened. People left set up the new
(18:40):
town of Valdis, which now has close to four thousand 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.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Yeah, it's kind of cool. You can go hike the
old Valdis 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.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah, and you know, this next part we need to
think specifically, I think Livia used a Smithsonian Magazine article
by Christian Elliott for this part. So big thanks to
Christian Elliot for all the hard work and Livia so
well of course in Libya always she's our north star
after all. But you know, we've already kind of said it,
(19:39):
but I guess more specifically we should say that, you know,
at this time in nineteen sixty four, 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
(20:02):
maybe things stripped it 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.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Yeah, I mean, it's crazy to think that plate tectonics
wasn't accepted until the sixties, but that's that's exactly how
it was. So this was such a massive earthquake, it
just presented all sorts of different places where evidence kind
of came along that said, Okay, explain this, what explains
this what explains that? And it turns out that plate
tectonics essentially was the only theory that fit, you know,
(20:39):
that explained how the earth went up here, or how
it sunk here, or how it moved fifty feet onto
the sea here, or why this you know, this town
just got swallowed up. All of this could be explained
by plate tectonics and not the other rival theories. I
think the the other rival theory was that earthquakes were
God's will, and play tectonics just explains it better.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Yeah, I agree. This is obviously a gold mine for
the US Geological Survey. So they got people to Alaska
like really quick, and you know, got out all their
do hickeys and whirley gigs and measuring tape, and we're like, hey,
we can really learn a lot from this stuff. You know,
(21:25):
people are being taken care of, so now we need
to kind of figure out what happens moving forward. One
of the interesting things they found, and some of the
stuff gets really really interesting. I think that popped up especially.
I'll just tease out the fungus that's coming among us soon.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
But they looked at those forests that you were talking
about that sunk below the ocean they you know, filled
up with like sediment and seawater and stuff. And they
were digging around down there trying to just study it.
And they kept digging and they said, you know what,
there's other like below this stuff. We're finding older land plants.
And so this has happened before, you guys, like probably
(22:06):
more than several times over the last like thousands or
millions of years, and it's gonna happen again.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Yeah, can't you kind of just see like if you
sped it up like a forest just sinking into the
sea and then being covered with sediment and a new
forest grows on top of it, and that sinks in
the sea, and if you do it fast enough that
bugs Bunny Powerhouse song just starts playing like it just
becomes a conveyor belt.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Yeah, it's just nuts to think about.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
But that's exactly what they found with that. And they
found that from the Alaska earthquake. And they were like, Okay,
didn't know that this happened. Now that we know this,
this is a thing, we can start looking for it
in other places we think are earthquake prone. And they
started looking around and they found it in other places
as a matter of fact, the big one along the
Cascadian subduction zone that threatens California every moment of every day.
(22:57):
We know about that thanks to the science that they
figured out thanks to the Alaska earthquake of sixty four.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Yeah, at birthed a new science in paleo seismology, which
is that I meaning that didn't happen every day. We
try all the time to birth new sciences and no
one's listening.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Now, but we don't have cool names like paleo seismology
or megathrust, and maybe we should rethink things.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
That's true. Mega thrust is the sexiest science.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Yeah, it sounds like a Guar album.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Oh it does actually.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Yeah. Another thing was that we kind of talked about
that we didn't really understand before were tsunamis title waves,
And of course we knew about tsunamis and title waves,
and I guess science has kind of had a pretty
decent grasp. I'm like, Okay, an epicenter of a major
earthquake out at sea is going to send a tsunami
(23:47):
and maybe we can't even calculate how long it'll take
to get there and all that stuff. But they were
baffled by why some of these coastal areas were hit
by tsunamis within just a couple of minutes of the earthquake.
It just did not fit into the understanding of tidal
waves at the time.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Yeah, for sure. So they you know, did some literal
digging and some figurative digging, and they came to this
was the unique shape of Alaska's coastline at the time,
where you know, very jagged and you'd have some deep
fiords where glaciers had cut into the land that would
send silts onto the ocean floor. And the quake just
(24:26):
kind of stirred all this stuff up, like you know,
sand in a glass that had been settled down there
for centuries and centuries. And these were basically underwater landslides
that caused these waves. So it was I think that
a new term was birth, which was land landslide tsunami.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Yeah. Yeah, it's like dropping something heavy in a bathtub
and preduke like that. But it's a little different, but
the same thing kind of.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
That's right. And you man, you got to tell them
about this spungus.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
This is it I hard to believe, this is yours.
I'll tee it up for you, all right, there is
a mystery with some fungus. Get to it.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Yeah, so Crypto caucus, that's pretty easy. Cryptoccus Gatti too,
TI's two eyes.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
No is Cryptococcus Gotti?
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Yeah, I got Ti? That's right. And how you have
to say it?
Speaker 2 (25:19):
I think so, but you have to go up really high.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Pitched got te. So this is a microscopic fungus. It
can be pretty bad. It can cause fatal infections. But
it's like this native to the tropics, So Alaska's like,
we don't have to worry about that kind of thing. Sure,
it grows on rotting wood in the tropics, and apparently
it survives pretty well in seawater. At the turn of
(25:42):
the twentieth century, apparently some of this fungus ended up
among us and by way of a ballast in the
water of a ship that was going on a route
from Brazil to Vancouver and off the coast of the
Pacific northwest there. Once this stuff was spilled out of
that ballast, it said, Hey, we like the seawater. We're
(26:03):
going to adapt and we're here. You don't know we're
here yet, but we're going to be here. In nineteen
sixty four, when this tsunami happens, and it's going to
spread us now far and wide, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
I mean that tsunami took this stuff that had just
been hanging out off the coast that no one even
knew was there except maybe that ship captain if he
was nefarious, that's right, and just spread it inland. This
is nineteen sixty four, and now all of a sudden,
the fungus is like, Okay, we're in a new habitat,
new ecosystem. Let's get to adapting here. And it did.
It survived that tsunami and started to readapt to life
(26:37):
on land, but life on land in the tundra essentially.
And so as that stuff started adapting and adapting, by
the nineties it was capable of infecting people again. And
there was this mysterious outbreak of Cryptococcus gati and they
could not figure out what the heck was going on because,
(26:57):
as far as anybody knew, the only place you found
that was in the tropics on rotting wood. I guess
some epidemiologists kind of put two and two together based
on the tsunami. He was like, basically, the only way
you could have taken this stuff and gotten it all
over the land is from a tsunami, so he figured
that's what happened.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
Yeah, and it's I just I would love to know
more about the story of how they traced it to
this one ship that went from Brazil to Vancouver. You know,
obviously shipping records, but it's still like quite a bit
of scientific detective work.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Yeah, for sure, for sure. And I'm not sure if
he figured that part out too or not, but I
know that I was reading in that article by Christian
Elliott in Smithsonian. He's talking about how the guy figured
out how it got onto land at least.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Yeah, pretty cool. All right, So we'll take our final
break here and we'll talk about maybe a silver lining
that came out of this right after this, all right. So,
(28:16):
you know, anytime something like this happens, there is usually
a scientific silver lining as far as just learning, you know,
about things that took place, learning how to maybe not
prevent in the future, but at least get more lead
time in the future. And then also and most importantly
probably is like how to build and where to build
moving forward.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Yeah, and the Alaska earthquake taught us not there, Nope,
not there either, Yeah, not there, not there, And it
just goes on like that, right, But people were like, no,
we want to build there. So one of the things
that we learned how to do was to number one,
figure out where not to build, but also how to
build so that like buildings just didn't immediately call apps
(29:00):
and whole towns weren't just swallowed up at the drop
of a richter. You know.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
Yeah, for sure, Alaska as a state started adopting you know,
obviously new building codes, and you know, especially if it
was like a big building, if it was like a
like a large apartment building, which I mean I don't
think Alaska has a ton of those, but you know,
larger buildings. They are now kind of neck and neck
(29:27):
with California for having the strictest building codes, and it's
worked pretty well. There was another big earthquake and Anchorage
in twenty eighteen that injured about one hundred and seventeen people.
That was a seven point zero and caused seventy six
million dollars in damages. But and you know, stuff got destroyed,
like roads and stuff, to be sure, but no one died.
(29:47):
There were no like really serious injuries, and a lot
of those buildings stayed you know upright.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Yeah, And So one reason or one way that they
developed those building codes and also where to build was
the widespread deployment of seismographs. Right. I think in the
nineteen sixty four earthquake, there were only two seismograph stations
in all of Alaska, right, and the oldest one had
been installed sixty years before. Right after that, they started
(30:16):
throwing seismic stations up all over Alaska, around California, in
western Canada, and we started to develop more and more information.
One thing I saw is that the thing that really
got seismographs out there though, was the arms race. The
nuclear arms race.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Oh yeah, we.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Were using seismographs to listen out for other countries secretly
testing nukes, and that that's what we were using them
for initially, and then people were like, huh, let's start
actually listening for earthquakes. So by being able to get
a lot of information about big and small quakes, how
frequently they were, where they were epicentered, we were able
(30:56):
to really kind of zero in and come up with
entire maps of where to build, where not to build.
There's this National Seismic Hazard Map, which is a party
in a map from what I understand, and we have
that thanks to this earthquake in the science that it
kicked off.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
Yeah, for sure. I think just like less than ten
years later, there were up to ninety seismic stations in
Alaska alone, and then by the mid two thousands, I
think one hundred and ninety seven sites in Alaska and
Western Canada. That was just over like a three year
period through the National Science Foundation's us Array project from
(31:39):
twenty fourteen to twenty seventeen is when they got all
those and then what we learned about, you know, tsunamis
and people living along the coast like that led to
a lot of new information as far as what was
ended up being the National Tsunami Warning Center.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Yeah, we definitely got way better at predicting where tsunamis
would hit, how bad it would be. And one of
the other things too, is I guess people didn't really
realize this, but if you were living on the coast,
probably if you were of European descent, I'll bet if
you were indigenous, you already knew this. But if you
feel an earthquake, go run to high land, Yeah, because
there's probably a tsunami coming within a couple minutes. That
(32:17):
seemed to have been widely understood only after the earthquake
in Alaska, which I guess makes sense if we didn't
understand local tsunamis at the time.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
Yeah, for sure they. I think the retreating glaciers are
potentially causing even more trouble as far as today goes
in Alaska. That permafrost could make the land more vulnerable
to you know, destruction. I know, I mentioned the twenty
eighteen one. There was even bigger one just a few
years ago in twenty twenty one, that reached eight point two,
(32:50):
but being Alaska, it was fortunately in a more remote area. Yeah,
and so a lot less damage. That's kind of you know,
the one benefit of Alaska. The reason this one was
so bad, it was because it hit the towns and
cities along.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
The coast right exactly for sure. Yeah. And the fossil
fuel industry was joyous because there pipeline, the Trans Alaska Pipeline,
did not suffer much damage in earthquake in two thousand
and two, I.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
Think, Yeah, I mean that's one of the big worries
is that there's so much oil activity there in fossil
fuel infrastructure that you know, an another big one that
did a lot of damage to that could cause you know,
big obviously human concerns, but very much could devastate the
(33:39):
region environmentally for sure.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
And I mean in part because so the Trans Alaska pipeline.
In this case, it was the Dnali fault that caused
a seven point nine magnitude earthquake the two thousand and
two to one, and that pipeline goes right across the fault.
So yes, it is a very seems like a tenuous
technology as it stands. For sure, you got anything else
(34:06):
about the Alaska earthquake of nineteen sixty four, I do not. Nope, Okay,
I don't either, So I guess that means it's time
for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Well, we're going to forego listener mail for the next
couple of weeks to chat a little bit like at
fireside chat about our upcoming sea voyage with Virgin Cruises
above the Valiant Lady, We're going to be taken to see, Okay,
taking and taken to see. We're going from New York
City to Bermuda October second through seventh with our colleagues,
(34:42):
our old pals. You know that we started the stuff
shows with way back in the day, A couple of
which stuff Mom never told you, and stuff they don't
want you to know. We'll be there with us, we'll
be doing a live show, we'll be doing some other stuff.
They keep talking about these other events we're going to do.
I don't know if it's like a trivia night or
definitely like meet and greets and stuff. But we're pretty
excited about it.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Yeah for sure. And I think, did you say we're
going to Bermuda? Yeah, okay, so I think it's worth
saying again we're going to Bermuda on this and it's
going to be a pretty fun five night cruise. And
I believe there's still passages that can be booked, but
they're actually selling like pretty fast. I'm impressed with us, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
I know, I'm excited. And we just found out, you know,
Matt and Noel and Ben with stuff they don't want
you to know, have been on one of these before.
And they said it was a great time. And they said,
here's a little pro tip. You know, the venue where
we're doing our actual the live podcast portion, you know,
can't fit twenty seven hundred like everybody on board, right,
(35:42):
And they said, hey, pro tip here is when you
get on board, you sign up for the different stuff.
So I think through the app, so they like tell
everybody to get on there and sign up for your
live show. But I think they're also like, they're gonna
have cameras and you can watch it on TV in
your room as well.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Oh, Nate, closed circuit Is there anything more wondrous than
close circuit TV?
Speaker 1 (36:03):
I don't know. We should do a show about it.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Yeah, that should be our onboard show, that's right. Yes,
So you can go to Virgin dot com slash Stuff
at Sea.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Right, yeah, or just google Stuff at Sea Virgin Cruises,
Stuff you Should Know Cruise. It'll all get you.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
There, and there really is no better time to learn
how to walk around with a parrot on your shoulder
than this particular.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Cruise, agreed.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
So yeah, So we'll see you guys in October, but
even before then, we'll see you on the next episode
of Stuff you Should Know. And in the meantime you
can send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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 nineteen sixty four.
I'm going to talk like this, Oh the rest of
the podcast. What do you think?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
I think that sixty percent of the people just stop listening.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Well, they are going to be sorry, because this is
going to be an interesting episode.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Yeah, this is you know, I had no idea how
earthquake prone Alaska is was and is until doing this
kind of research.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Oh. I was raised on that knowledge. My family talked
about it a lot.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
No comment in Toledo.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Hey, Chuck, I have a question. Will you ask me
the first time I was ever in an earthquake or
ever felt in earthquake?
Speaker 1 (01:01):
When's the first time you ever felt to earthquake?
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Yesterday? Chuck? Will you ask me a follow up question?
Ask what I was reading while I experienced that first earthquake?
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Well, where were you and what were you reading?
Speaker 2 (01:15):
I was reading this article about Alaska earth the Alaska
earthquake of nineteen sixty four, and I was at home.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Wow, I didn't know that you guys felt a trimmer.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
There was one in Cuba, like a six point eight,
and I felt it in Central Florida, plain a day.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Wow, I've never I lived in LA for five years
and I never felt a single anything.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah. I pretty much assumed I would go the rest
of my life with that feeling an earthquake, and nope, nope.
Cuba had other ideas.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
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 could feel things, and
like the upset that it caused like around the world,
it's nuts.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Yeah, a lot of people were upset about this for sure.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
All Right, Well, we're talking about the Good Friday earthquake
of nineteen sixty four in Alaska, which at the time
was the biggest, well the second largest ever in the
world that they had recorded at nine point two, just
behind the nine point five that hit Chile in nineteen sixty. Yeah,
(02:25):
and considering the devastation that happened in Alaska, and probably
only because it happened in Alaska, it only killed one
hundred and thirty one people, which is a lot. But
I think the earthquake itself in Alaska. How many people
It's like fifteen people.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Maybe, yeah, I think there was actually in the whole
state something like.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
No, no, no, I'm saying how many people it killed?
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Was only oh oh, sorry, I thought you're saying how
many people lived in Alaska.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
No, just like the literal earthquake of people in Alaska.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
I think it was like, yeah, fifteen or sixteen people.
That was it from the actual earthquake. Yeah, I wonder
why he laughed. Yeah, that was why, because I thought
you were making a joke and I thought it was hilarious.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
So let's get to today.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Well, there was one other big thing about this earthquake
besides just the massiveness. I mean, nine point five that
is awfully close to as high as you can go
on the Richter scale.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Right, yeah, nine point two was this one? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Nine point two? Sorry, Chili was the nine point five
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
(03:42):
with this nineteen sixty four earthquake because we were able
to like go study it. It happened at just the
right time in a.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Sense, Yeah, for sure. And this was a mega thrust earthquake.
And as it turns out, the most destructive kind of
earthquake that the world knows is the mega thrust. Out
of the ten of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded have
been mega thrust. And that is where and you know,
we've talked about this in the Earthquakes episode as well
(04:09):
as other ones, probably the Japanese tsunami one as well. Sure,
but this mega thrust earthquake is what happens when you
have two tectonic plates hitting one another, and the case
of the mega thrust, the heavier one slides below the
lighter one, and that heavier plate just dives into the mantle.
(04:31):
It's you know, we talked about subduction a lot, but
it subduces.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
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
(04:59):
just press, impressed 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 the entire,
an entire region of Earth suddenly lurches forward like fifty feet.
And when that happens, that's where you get like ten
(05:20):
out of the ten most powerful earthquakes. That's where they
come from. They're all mega thrust earthquakes, and that's how
they're produced.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
That's right. The one in sixty four in Alaska was
at the Alaska Aleutian Subduction Zone, and that's where the
plates here in North America side 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,
(05:53):
but it runs along the Gulf of Alaska to Russia's
Kamchatka Peninsula.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Which is an island in Russia.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
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.
(06:23):
This thing exists under the oceans off shore. 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.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Yeah, so you know, you said that that can happen
really quickly. That's kind of what happens with these mega
thrust 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 was moving. They
said that the plates moved they estimate between thirty to
six defeat kind of all at the same time, and
(07:03):
that the area that moved, this is staggering, was five
hundred miles by one hundred and twenty five.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Miles suddenly moved sixty feet like in seconds.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Yeah, it's just yeah, it's hard to believe, right.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
And so again, like this five hundred by one hundred
and twenty five 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
(07:39):
of crazy effects, in part because the earthquake itself, nine
point two, lasted for like four minutes. Yeah, four minutes
of a nine point two earthquake sounds terrifying and crazy destructive.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Yeah. This was on March twenty seventh of that year,
at about five thirty six pm is when it kicked
out off. And you know when I talked about like
how far reaching it was. Here are some like pretty
startling examples. There were water level changes registered across every
United State state except for Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware.
(08:16):
And when you see things like a well or a
pond slashing back and forth, like water that doesn't normally
move around is being moved, those are called seashwaves. And
those were reported as far away as Australia and South Africa.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Yeah, can't you see some little Australian can go a
paw the pond's moving.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
It's a good Australian kid.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Yeah, I thought so too. So those what'd you call
them seiche waves?
Speaker 1 (08:46):
I called them siashwaves, seashwaves.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Okay, So in the Gulf, the Gulf of Mexico, fishing
boats sank off Louisiana because those seishewaves slashing back and
forth in the Gulf of Mexico was so potent so
that it swamped some boats and sank them in the
Gulf of Mexico, which is nowhere near Alaska.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
Yeah, it swayed the space needle. And by the way,
you maybe had been reading too much of German on
the show, because I think it probably would be siche
in German.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Yeah, something happened my brain like just ticked into just
enough German that I mispronounced stuff a lot.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Now, well I may be wrong too, but because maybe
it's a German word, I have no idea.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Okay, s E C H.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
E E E waves.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Just want to get the end. Yeah, that thing rocked
the space Needle, which is about a thousand miles away.
And they did, you know, geological surveys afterward. They showed
some parts of the coast were close to forty feet
higher than they used to be. Other parts were, you know,
a to eight feet lower than they used to be.
It literally changed the coastline of Alaska as much as
(10:07):
fifty 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.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
This is the kind of thing that presents a challenge
to the rock.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
Yeah, exactly, only he could save us, exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Unfortunately he was just a little tike 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 forests on the coastline that
dropped into the ocean, not like oh, the lands caving
in and all these these trees are like falling over
(10:48):
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. I like anything underwater I
find fascinating, but also the idea of that happening like
(11:08):
that suddenly is just mind boggling to me.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Anything underwater's fascinating.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Anything that's not supposed to be underwater that is underwater.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Ah.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Okay, have you seen the Drowned House?
Speaker 1 (11:22):
I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
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,
so it's now underwater, and just that alone is awesome,
But the plot's pretty cool too.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
So you're going deep with your horror.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
I mean, there's just so much bad horror out there
that you really have to hunt.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Yeah, and I didn't mean that to be a pun.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
By the way, going deep with the horror, yeah underwater?
Oh oh yeah, German part of me, I'm taking everything
quite literally. There's no such thing as anything funny.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
You know, we're going to talk a lot about the
effects of the water, because again it's some pretty like
devastating and remarkable stuff happened. I was right, It was
only about fifteen 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.
I think the big one reached a wave reached a
(12:28):
height of about two hundred feet, which is incredible to
think about it. You know, as far south as California,
like twelve people died in California from an earthquake that
happened in Alaska.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Yeah, I went southward. It also went westward, went right
past Hawaii all the way to Japan. It it 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 two hundred feet that's just nuts.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Right, Yeah, this is a big wave.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
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, not two
(13:25):
hundred foot tsunamis, but still enough to like reck 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 Chenega, and four minutes after the earthquake, it just
got washed away. There were sixty eight people who live there,
(13:46):
twenty three 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 one hundred feet above
sea level. So like everything else in the town was
just gone thanks to a tsunami that hit like lightning fast.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Yeah, I've got one for everyone here. Valdis, at Port Valdiz,
they were, you know, everything kind of along the coastline.
There was obviously swept into the ocean. Thirty two people
very sadly passed in Valdiese and it ended up catching
on fire, the oil tankers and stuff that were there,
(14:24):
and then those were brought out to see so like
you talk about a movie like oil tankers on fire
in a wave being transported across the ocean.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
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 Omega Thrust 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.
(14:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
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, an Alaska at least that got hit.
There was a landslide because it also triggered landslides. We
should have mentioned that, and the entire business district sank
(15:26):
about nine feet. There were some building collapses, to be sure,
but others just look kind of like the forest just dropped,
like you know, anywhere from nine to twenty feet below
ones that were just on the other side of the street.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Did you see photos of that?
Speaker 1 (15:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Yeah, it takes a section for sure, like one of
those three d I posters, but with earthquake stuff instead.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
We did a whole episode on those.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
We did, and if I remember correctly, that was pretty interesting.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Yeah, the magic I think.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
You want to take that break you mentioned.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Yeah, we'll take a break and talk about sort of
what happened after right after this.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
So four minutes later, the earthquake stops, but there's still tsunamis,
there's fires at sea, even like whole towns of collapse,
Like it takes a little while for the dust to
finally settle. When it does, I think, like the next day,
Lyndon Johnson, who was president at the time, said, Alaska
(16:52):
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
(17:13):
touch with them. 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 three billion dollars in
today's dollars. Yeah, which again, like this is a state
with like a population of I think two hundred and
fifty thousand people at the time, Like it was not
populated at all, but that's how much damage that earthquake did.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Still, Yeah, they had to you know, I mentioned earlier
that it changed the shape of Alaska and its coastline.
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, and they
had to kind of, you know, redraw all of that area.
(17:58):
Some people were, you know, Alaska strong, so we're not leaving.
We're gonna 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 Valdis is a great example because the Army Corps
of Engineers came in and said, you know, Josh Clark
(18:19):
one day will say that this was built on a
gravel foundation, so you shouldn't even rebuild there. And there
were only about five hundred, you know, plus or minus
people living there at the time, and they said, you
got three years to get out of here. We got
a new Valdis for you about four miles away, and
that's generally what happened. People left set up the new
(18:40):
town of Valdis, which now has close to four thousand 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.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Yeah, it's kind of cool. You can go hike the
old Valdis 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.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah, and you know, this next part we need to
think specifically, I think Livia used a Smithsonian Magazine article
by Christian Elliott for this part. So big thanks to
Christian Elliot for all the hard work and Livia so
well of course in Libya always she's our north star
after all. But you know, we've already kind of said it,
(19:39):
but I guess more specifically we should say that, you know,
at this time in nineteen sixty four, 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
(20:02):
maybe things stripped it 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.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Yeah, I mean, it's crazy to think that plate tectonics
wasn't accepted until the sixties, but that's that's exactly how
it was. So this was such a massive earthquake, it
just presented all sorts of different places where evidence kind
of came along that said, Okay, explain this, what explains
this what explains that? And it turns out that plate
tectonics essentially was the only theory that fit, you know,
(20:39):
that explained how the earth went up here, or how
it sunk here, or how it moved fifty feet onto
the sea here, or why this you know, this town
just got swallowed up. All of this could be explained
by plate tectonics and not the other rival theories. I
think the the other rival theory was that earthquakes were
God's will, and play tectonics just explains it better.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Yeah, I agree. This is obviously a gold mine for
the US Geological Survey. So they got people to Alaska
like really quick, and you know, got out all their
do hickeys and whirley gigs and measuring tape, and we're like, hey,
we can really learn a lot from this stuff. You know,
(21:25):
people are being taken care of, so now we need
to kind of figure out what happens moving forward. One
of the interesting things they found, and some of the
stuff gets really really interesting. I think that popped up especially.
I'll just tease out the fungus that's coming among us soon.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
But they looked at those forests that you were talking
about that sunk below the ocean they you know, filled
up with like sediment and seawater and stuff. And they
were digging around down there trying to just study it.
And they kept digging and they said, you know what,
there's other like below this stuff. We're finding older land plants.
And so this has happened before, you guys, like probably
(22:06):
more than several times over the last like thousands or
millions of years, and it's gonna happen again.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Yeah, can't you kind of just see like if you
sped it up like a forest just sinking into the
sea and then being covered with sediment and a new
forest grows on top of it, and that sinks in
the sea, and if you do it fast enough that
bugs Bunny Powerhouse song just starts playing like it just
becomes a conveyor belt.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Yeah, it's just nuts to think about.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
But that's exactly what they found with that. And they
found that from the Alaska earthquake. And they were like, Okay,
didn't know that this happened. Now that we know this,
this is a thing, we can start looking for it
in other places we think are earthquake prone. And they
started looking around and they found it in other places
as a matter of fact, the big one along the
Cascadian subduction zone that threatens California every moment of every day.
(22:57):
We know about that thanks to the science that they
figured out thanks to the Alaska earthquake of sixty four.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Yeah, at birthed a new science in paleo seismology, which
is that I meaning that didn't happen every day. We
try all the time to birth new sciences and no
one's listening.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Now, but we don't have cool names like paleo seismology
or megathrust, and maybe we should rethink things.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
That's true. Mega thrust is the sexiest science.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Yeah, it sounds like a Guar album.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Oh it does actually.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Yeah. Another thing was that we kind of talked about
that we didn't really understand before were tsunamis title waves,
And of course we knew about tsunamis and title waves,
and I guess science has kind of had a pretty
decent grasp. I'm like, Okay, an epicenter of a major
earthquake out at sea is going to send a tsunami
(23:47):
and maybe we can't even calculate how long it'll take
to get there and all that stuff. But they were
baffled by why some of these coastal areas were hit
by tsunamis within just a couple of minutes of the earthquake.
It just did not fit into the understanding of tidal
waves at the time.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Yeah, for sure. So they you know, did some literal
digging and some figurative digging, and they came to this
was the unique shape of Alaska's coastline at the time,
where you know, very jagged and you'd have some deep
fiords where glaciers had cut into the land that would
send silts onto the ocean floor. And the quake just
(24:26):
kind of stirred all this stuff up, like you know,
sand in a glass that had been settled down there
for centuries and centuries. And these were basically underwater landslides
that caused these waves. So it was I think that
a new term was birth, which was land landslide tsunami.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Yeah. Yeah, it's like dropping something heavy in a bathtub
and preduke like that. But it's a little different, but
the same thing kind of.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
That's right. And you man, you got to tell them
about this spungus.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
This is it I hard to believe, this is yours.
I'll tee it up for you, all right, there is
a mystery with some fungus. Get to it.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Yeah, so Crypto caucus, that's pretty easy. Cryptoccus Gatti too,
TI's two eyes.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
No is Cryptococcus Gotti?
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Yeah, I got Ti? That's right. And how you have
to say it?
Speaker 2 (25:19):
I think so, but you have to go up really high.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Pitched got te. So this is a microscopic fungus. It
can be pretty bad. It can cause fatal infections. But
it's like this native to the tropics, So Alaska's like,
we don't have to worry about that kind of thing. Sure,
it grows on rotting wood in the tropics, and apparently
it survives pretty well in seawater. At the turn of
(25:42):
the twentieth century, apparently some of this fungus ended up
among us and by way of a ballast in the
water of a ship that was going on a route
from Brazil to Vancouver and off the coast of the
Pacific northwest there. Once this stuff was spilled out of
that ballast, it said, Hey, we like the seawater. We're
(26:03):
going to adapt and we're here. You don't know we're
here yet, but we're going to be here. In nineteen
sixty four, when this tsunami happens, and it's going to
spread us now far and wide, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
I mean that tsunami took this stuff that had just
been hanging out off the coast that no one even
knew was there except maybe that ship captain if he
was nefarious, that's right, and just spread it inland. This
is nineteen sixty four, and now all of a sudden,
the fungus is like, Okay, we're in a new habitat,
new ecosystem. Let's get to adapting here. And it did.
It survived that tsunami and started to readapt to life
(26:37):
on land, but life on land in the tundra essentially.
And so as that stuff started adapting and adapting, by
the nineties it was capable of infecting people again. And
there was this mysterious outbreak of Cryptococcus gati and they
could not figure out what the heck was going on because,
(26:57):
as far as anybody knew, the only place you found
that was in the tropics on rotting wood. I guess
some epidemiologists kind of put two and two together based
on the tsunami. He was like, basically, the only way
you could have taken this stuff and gotten it all
over the land is from a tsunami, so he figured
that's what happened.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
Yeah, and it's I just I would love to know
more about the story of how they traced it to
this one ship that went from Brazil to Vancouver. You know,
obviously shipping records, but it's still like quite a bit
of scientific detective work.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Yeah, for sure, for sure. And I'm not sure if
he figured that part out too or not, but I
know that I was reading in that article by Christian
Elliott in Smithsonian. He's talking about how the guy figured
out how it got onto land at least.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Yeah, pretty cool. All right, So we'll take our final
break here and we'll talk about maybe a silver lining
that came out of this right after this, all right. So,
(28:16):
you know, anytime something like this happens, there is usually
a scientific silver lining as far as just learning, you know,
about things that took place, learning how to maybe not
prevent in the future, but at least get more lead
time in the future. And then also and most importantly
probably is like how to build and where to build
moving forward.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Yeah, and the Alaska earthquake taught us not there, Nope,
not there either, Yeah, not there, not there, And it
just goes on like that, right, But people were like, no,
we want to build there. So one of the things
that we learned how to do was to number one,
figure out where not to build, but also how to
build so that like buildings just didn't immediately call apps
(29:00):
and whole towns weren't just swallowed up at the drop
of a richter. You know.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
Yeah, for sure, Alaska as a state started adopting you know,
obviously new building codes, and you know, especially if it
was like a big building, if it was like a
like a large apartment building, which I mean I don't
think Alaska has a ton of those, but you know,
larger buildings. They are now kind of neck and neck
(29:27):
with California for having the strictest building codes, and it's
worked pretty well. There was another big earthquake and Anchorage
in twenty eighteen that injured about one hundred and seventeen people.
That was a seven point zero and caused seventy six
million dollars in damages. But and you know, stuff got destroyed,
like roads and stuff, to be sure, but no one died.
(29:47):
There were no like really serious injuries, and a lot
of those buildings stayed you know upright.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Yeah, And So one reason or one way that they
developed those building codes and also where to build was
the widespread deployment of seismographs. Right. I think in the
nineteen sixty four earthquake, there were only two seismograph stations
in all of Alaska, right, and the oldest one had
been installed sixty years before. Right after that, they started
(30:16):
throwing seismic stations up all over Alaska, around California, in
western Canada, and we started to develop more and more information.
One thing I saw is that the thing that really
got seismographs out there though, was the arms race. The
nuclear arms race.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Oh yeah, we.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Were using seismographs to listen out for other countries secretly
testing nukes, and that that's what we were using them
for initially, and then people were like, huh, let's start
actually listening for earthquakes. So by being able to get
a lot of information about big and small quakes, how
frequently they were, where they were epicentered, we were able
(30:56):
to really kind of zero in and come up with
entire maps of where to build, where not to build.
There's this National Seismic Hazard Map, which is a party
in a map from what I understand, and we have
that thanks to this earthquake in the science that it
kicked off.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
Yeah, for sure. I think just like less than ten
years later, there were up to ninety seismic stations in
Alaska alone, and then by the mid two thousands, I
think one hundred and ninety seven sites in Alaska and
Western Canada. That was just over like a three year
period through the National Science Foundation's us Array project from
(31:39):
twenty fourteen to twenty seventeen is when they got all
those and then what we learned about, you know, tsunamis
and people living along the coast like that led to
a lot of new information as far as what was
ended up being the National Tsunami Warning Center.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
Yeah, we definitely got way better at predicting where tsunamis
would hit, how bad it would be. And one of
the other things too, is I guess people didn't really
realize this, but if you were living on the coast,
probably if you were of European descent, I'll bet if
you were indigenous, you already knew this. But if you
feel an earthquake, go run to high land, Yeah, because
there's probably a tsunami coming within a couple minutes. That
(32:17):
seemed to have been widely understood only after the earthquake
in Alaska, which I guess makes sense if we didn't
understand local tsunamis at the time.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
Yeah, for sure they. I think the retreating glaciers are
potentially causing even more trouble as far as today goes
in Alaska. That permafrost could make the land more vulnerable
to you know, destruction. I know, I mentioned the twenty
eighteen one. There was even bigger one just a few
years ago in twenty twenty one, that reached eight point two,
(32:50):
but being Alaska, it was fortunately in a more remote area. Yeah,
and so a lot less damage. That's kind of you know,
the one benefit of Alaska. The reason this one was
so bad, it was because it hit the towns and
cities along.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
The coast right exactly for sure. Yeah. And the fossil
fuel industry was joyous because there pipeline, the Trans Alaska Pipeline,
did not suffer much damage in earthquake in two thousand
and two, I.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
Think, Yeah, I mean that's one of the big worries
is that there's so much oil activity there in fossil
fuel infrastructure that you know, an another big one that
did a lot of damage to that could cause you know,
big obviously human concerns, but very much could devastate the
(33:39):
region environmentally for sure.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
And I mean in part because so the Trans Alaska pipeline.
In this case, it was the Dnali fault that caused
a seven point nine magnitude earthquake the two thousand and
two to one, and that pipeline goes right across the fault.
So yes, it is a very seems like a tenuous
technology as it stands. For sure, you got anything else
(34:06):
about the Alaska earthquake of nineteen sixty four, I do not. Nope, Okay,
I don't either, So I guess that means it's time
for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Well, we're going to forego listener mail for the next
couple of weeks to chat a little bit like at
fireside chat about our upcoming sea voyage with Virgin Cruises
above the Valiant Lady, We're going to be taken to see, Okay,
taking and taken to see. We're going from New York
City to Bermuda October second through seventh with our colleagues,
(34:42):
our old pals. You know that we started the stuff
shows with way back in the day, A couple of
which stuff Mom never told you, and stuff they don't
want you to know. We'll be there with us, we'll
be doing a live show, we'll be doing some other stuff.
They keep talking about these other events we're going to do.
I don't know if it's like a trivia night or
definitely like meet and greets and stuff. But we're pretty
excited about it.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Yeah for sure. And I think, did you say we're
going to Bermuda? Yeah, okay, so I think it's worth
saying again we're going to Bermuda on this and it's
going to be a pretty fun five night cruise. And
I believe there's still passages that can be booked, but
they're actually selling like pretty fast. I'm impressed with us, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
I know, I'm excited. And we just found out, you know,
Matt and Noel and Ben with stuff they don't want
you to know, have been on one of these before.
And they said it was a great time. And they said,
here's a little pro tip. You know, the venue where
we're doing our actual the live podcast portion, you know,
can't fit twenty seven hundred like everybody on board, right,
(35:42):
And they said, hey, pro tip here is when you
get on board, you sign up for the different stuff.
So I think through the app, so they like tell
everybody to get on there and sign up for your
live show. But I think they're also like, they're gonna
have cameras and you can watch it on TV in
your room as well.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Oh, Nate, closed circuit Is there anything more wondrous than
close circuit TV?
Speaker 1 (36:03):
I don't know. We should do a show about it.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Yeah, that should be our onboard show, that's right. Yes,
So you can go to Virgin dot com slash Stuff
at Sea.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Right, yeah, or just google Stuff at Sea Virgin Cruises,
Stuff you Should Know Cruise. It'll all get you.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
There, and there really is no better time to learn
how to walk around with a parrot on your shoulder
than this particular.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Cruise, agreed.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
So yeah, So we'll see you guys in October, but
even before then, we'll see you on the next episode
of Stuff you Should Know. And in the meantime you
can send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio
dot com.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
Hey Jonas!
Hey Jonas! The official Jonas Brothers podcast. Hosted by Kevin, Joe, and Nick Jonas. It’s the Jonas Brothers you know... musicians, actors, and well, yes, brothers. Now, they’re sharing another side of themselves in the playful, intimate, and irreverent way only they can. Spend time with the Jonas Brothers here and stay a little bit longer for deep conversations like never before.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com