# Alaska Earthquake of 1964

An episode of [Stuff You Should Know](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/278981407), 2 Jul 2026, 37 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/a91018a4-ea4f-4130-bf55-ae270180c327/48109605-021f-4a87-81fe-b47400fd9e33/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=44710ecc-10bb-48d1-93c7-ae270180c33e

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.

## Transcript

[0:01] Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
[0:11] Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
[0:13] Speaker 2: Chuck and Jerry's here too, And this is Stuff you
[0:16] Speaker 2: should Know about earthquakes in Alaska in nineteen sixty four.
[0:21] Speaker 2: I'm going to talk like this, Oh the rest of
[0:23] Speaker 2: the podcast. What do you think?
[0:26] Speaker 1: I think that sixty percent of the people just stop listening.
[0:30] Speaker 2: Well, they are going to be sorry, because this is
[0:34] Speaker 2: going to be an interesting episode.
[0:36] Speaker 1: Yeah, this is you know, I had no idea how
[0:40] Speaker 1: earthquake prone Alaska is was and is until doing this
[0:45] Speaker 1: kind of research.
[0:46] Speaker 2: Oh. I was raised on that knowledge. My family talked
[0:49] Speaker 2: about it a lot.
[0:51] Speaker 1: No comment in Toledo.
[0:53] Speaker 2: Hey, Chuck, I have a question. Will you ask me
[0:56] Speaker 2: the first time I was ever in an earthquake or
[0:59] Speaker 2: ever felt in earthquake?
[1:01] Speaker 1: When's the first time you ever felt to earthquake?
[1:04] Speaker 2: Yesterday? Chuck? Will you ask me a follow up question?
[1:08] Speaker 2: Ask what I was reading while I experienced that first earthquake?
[1:13] Speaker 1: Well, where were you and what were you reading?
[1:15] Speaker 2: I was reading this article about Alaska earth the Alaska
[1:20] Speaker 2: earthquake of nineteen sixty four, and I was at home.
[1:23] Speaker 1: Wow, I didn't know that you guys felt a trimmer.
[1:25] Speaker 2: There was one in Cuba, like a six point eight,
[1:28] Speaker 2: and I felt it in Central Florida, plain a day.
[1:31] Speaker 1: Wow, I've never I lived in LA for five years
[1:34] Speaker 1: and I never felt a single anything.
[1:36] Speaker 2: Yeah. I pretty much assumed I would go the rest
[1:39] Speaker 2: of my life with that feeling an earthquake, and nope, nope.
[1:43] Speaker 2: Cuba had other ideas.
[1:45] Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I mean after reading about how like far away,
[1:49] Speaker 1: Like there's some pretty startling stuff in this episode, like
[1:53] Speaker 1: as far as how far away could feel things, and
[1:56] Speaker 1: like the upset that it caused like around the world,
[2:00] Speaker 1: it's nuts.
[2:01] Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of people were upset about this for sure.
[2:05] Speaker 1: All Right, Well, we're talking about the Good Friday earthquake
[2:08] Speaker 1: of nineteen sixty four in Alaska, which at the time
[2:12] Speaker 1: was the biggest, well the second largest ever in the
[2:16] Speaker 1: world that they had recorded at nine point two, just
[2:20] Speaker 1: behind the nine point five that hit Chile in nineteen sixty. Yeah,
[2:25] Speaker 1: and considering the devastation that happened in Alaska, and probably
[2:28] Speaker 1: only because it happened in Alaska, it only killed one
[2:32] Speaker 1: hundred and thirty one people, which is a lot. But
[2:36] Speaker 1: I think the earthquake itself in Alaska. How many people
[2:40] Speaker 1: It's like fifteen people.
[2:41] Speaker 2: Maybe, yeah, I think there was actually in the whole
[2:44] Speaker 2: state something like.
[2:46] Speaker 1: No, no, no, I'm saying how many people it killed?
[2:48] Speaker 2: Was only oh oh, sorry, I thought you're saying how
[2:50] Speaker 2: many people lived in Alaska.
[2:51] Speaker 1: No, just like the literal earthquake of people in Alaska.
[2:55] Speaker 2: I think it was like, yeah, fifteen or sixteen people.
[2:57] Speaker 2: That was it from the actual earthquake. Yeah, I wonder
[3:00] Speaker 2: why he laughed. Yeah, that was why, because I thought
[3:03] Speaker 2: you were making a joke and I thought it was hilarious.
[3:06] Speaker 1: So let's get to today.
[3:08] Speaker 2: Well, there was one other big thing about this earthquake
[3:11] Speaker 2: besides just the massiveness. I mean, nine point five that
[3:13] Speaker 2: is awfully close to as high as you can go
[3:16] Speaker 2: on the Richter scale.
[3:17] Speaker 1: Right, yeah, nine point two was this one? Yeah?
[3:19] Speaker 2: Nine point two? Sorry, Chili was the nine point five
[3:22] Speaker 2: Still nothing to sneeze at, right, second largest earthquake on record.
[3:27] Speaker 2: One of the other reasons that it's important or significant
[3:29] Speaker 2: is because it basically opened up the door for seismology
[3:34] Speaker 2: and our understanding of earthquakes and tsunamis and basically everything
[3:38] Speaker 2: we know about those things today. Kind of kicked off
[3:42] Speaker 2: with this nineteen sixty four earthquake because we were able
[3:45] Speaker 2: to like go study it. It happened at just the
[3:47] Speaker 2: right time in a.
[3:48] Speaker 1: Sense, Yeah, for sure. And this was a mega thrust earthquake.
[3:53] Speaker 1: And as it turns out, the most destructive kind of
[3:56] Speaker 1: earthquake that the world knows is the mega thrust. Out
[4:00] Speaker 1: of the ten of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded have
[4:03] Speaker 1: been mega thrust. And that is where and you know,
[4:06] Speaker 1: we've talked about this in the Earthquakes episode as well
[4:09] Speaker 1: as other ones, probably the Japanese tsunami one as well. Sure,
[4:14] Speaker 1: but this mega thrust earthquake is what happens when you
[4:17] Speaker 1: have two tectonic plates hitting one another, and the case
[4:22] Speaker 1: of the mega thrust, the heavier one slides below the
[4:25] Speaker 1: lighter one, and that heavier plate just dives into the mantle.
[4:31] Speaker 1: It's you know, we talked about subduction a lot, but
[4:34] Speaker 1: it subduces.
[4:36] Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, It's subdued by the top one, right, And
[4:39] Speaker 2: as it goes further and further in like the whole
[4:42] Speaker 2: Earth's crust gets recycled over incredible spans of time. The
[4:46] Speaker 2: problem is what causes a megathrust earthquake is that in
[4:49] Speaker 2: some places that subdued plate doesn't go down. It locks
[4:55] Speaker 2: with the plate on top when they converge, and they
[4:59] Speaker 2: just press, impressed and press and press, and then eventually
[5:02] Speaker 2: one of them is going to give. It's like a
[5:05] Speaker 2: game of chicken or something like that. And when they give,
[5:08] Speaker 2: it just slips, and it slips really quickly, and the entire,
[5:11] Speaker 2: an entire region of Earth suddenly lurches forward like fifty feet.
[5:16] Speaker 2: And when that happens, that's where you get like ten
[5:20] Speaker 2: out of the ten most powerful earthquakes. That's where they
[5:24] Speaker 2: come from. They're all mega thrust earthquakes, and that's how
[5:26] Speaker 2: they're produced.
[5:27] Speaker 1: That's right. The one in sixty four in Alaska was
[5:32] Speaker 1: at the Alaska Aleutian Subduction Zone, and that's where the
[5:37] Speaker 1: plates here in North America side over the Pacific plates
[5:40] Speaker 1: is where they meet one another. And I think it
[5:44] Speaker 1: runs from the Gulf of Alaska, and as we'll see,
[5:47] Speaker 1: the epicenter was kind of right there on the waterfront almost,
[5:53] Speaker 1: but it runs along the Gulf of Alaska to Russia's
[5:56] Speaker 1: Kamchatka Peninsula.
[5:58] Speaker 2: Which is an island in Russia.
[6:00] Speaker 1: That's right.
[6:02] Speaker 2: Yeah, it's basically like the worst place to live. But
[6:05] Speaker 2: at the time when people were settling along Alaska seward
[6:08] Speaker 2: and what was the other big city that was affected
[6:14] Speaker 2: by this anchorage and then a bunch of other slightly
[6:17] Speaker 2: smaller cities, they didn't know that the subduction zone existed.
[6:21] Speaker 2: It's nothing you can walk up to and point to.
[6:23] Speaker 2: This thing exists under the oceans off shore. So they
[6:27] Speaker 2: didn't know. But they found out in a big way
[6:29] Speaker 2: after this earthquake that oh, yeah, actually there's a subduction zone.
[6:34] Speaker 2: And as a matter of fact, the whole theory of
[6:35] Speaker 2: plate tectonics is correct. This was another thing that it
[6:38] Speaker 2: proved or showed.
[6:39] Speaker 1: Yeah, so you know, you said that that can happen
[6:43] Speaker 1: really quickly. That's kind of what happens with these mega
[6:46] Speaker 1: thrust earthquakes and why they're so kind of spectacular is
[6:50] Speaker 1: that the speed at which it happens. And then in
[6:52] Speaker 1: this case, just like how much was was moving. They
[6:56] Speaker 1: said that the plates moved they estimate between thirty to
[6:59] Speaker 1: six defeat kind of all at the same time, and
[7:03] Speaker 1: that the area that moved, this is staggering, was five
[7:07] Speaker 1: hundred miles by one hundred and twenty five.
[7:09] Speaker 2: Miles suddenly moved sixty feet like in seconds.
[7:14] Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just yeah, it's hard to believe, right.
[7:19] Speaker 2: And so again, like this five hundred by one hundred
[7:22] Speaker 2: and twenty five mile chunk Anchorage, Valdez, sorry, Valdez, Seward
[7:28] Speaker 2: and a bunch of other towns are like on that
[7:31] Speaker 2: chunk of land that suddenly lurched forward. So not only
[7:35] Speaker 2: did the land lurch, this earthquake just had all sorts
[7:39] Speaker 2: of crazy effects, in part because the earthquake itself, nine
[7:43] Speaker 2: point two, lasted for like four minutes. Yeah, four minutes
[7:49] Speaker 2: of a nine point two earthquake sounds terrifying and crazy destructive.
[7:54] Speaker 1: Yeah. This was on March twenty seventh of that year,
[7:57] Speaker 1: at about five thirty six pm is when it kicked
[7:59] Speaker 1: out off. And you know when I talked about like
[8:02] Speaker 1: how far reaching it was. Here are some like pretty
[8:06] Speaker 1: startling examples. There were water level changes registered across every
[8:12] Speaker 1: United State state except for Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware.
[8:16] Speaker 1: And when you see things like a well or a
[8:19] Speaker 1: pond slashing back and forth, like water that doesn't normally
[8:23] Speaker 1: move around is being moved, those are called seashwaves. And
[8:28] Speaker 1: those were reported as far away as Australia and South Africa.
[8:32] Speaker 2: Yeah, can't you see some little Australian can go a
[8:36] Speaker 2: paw the pond's moving.
[8:39] Speaker 1: It's a good Australian kid.
[8:40] Speaker 2: Yeah, I thought so too. So those what'd you call
[8:44] Speaker 2: them seiche waves?
[8:46] Speaker 1: I called them siashwaves, seashwaves.
[8:48] Speaker 2: Okay, So in the Gulf, the Gulf of Mexico, fishing
[8:53] Speaker 2: boats sank off Louisiana because those seishewaves slashing back and
[8:57] Speaker 2: forth in the Gulf of Mexico was so potent so
[9:00] Speaker 2: that it swamped some boats and sank them in the
[9:02] Speaker 2: Gulf of Mexico, which is nowhere near Alaska.
[9:06] Speaker 1: Yeah, it swayed the space needle. And by the way,
[9:09] Speaker 1: you maybe had been reading too much of German on
[9:12] Speaker 1: the show, because I think it probably would be siche
[9:14] Speaker 1: in German.
[9:15] Speaker 2: Yeah, something happened my brain like just ticked into just
[9:20] Speaker 2: enough German that I mispronounced stuff a lot.
[9:22] Speaker 1: Now, well I may be wrong too, but because maybe
[9:25] Speaker 1: it's a German word, I have no idea.
[9:26] Speaker 2: Well, let's spell it for everybody and then the listeners
[9:28] Speaker 2: can make up for themselves how to pronounce it, shall we.
[9:31] Speaker 2: I'll take the first letter, you take the second. We'll
[9:34] Speaker 2: just alternate, like that.
[9:35] Speaker 1: Okay, s E C H.
[9:39] Speaker 2: E E E waves.
[9:42] Speaker 1: Just want to get the end. Yeah, that thing rocked
[9:45] Speaker 1: the space Needle, which is about a thousand miles away.
[9:48] Speaker 1: And they did, you know, geological surveys afterward. They showed
[9:53] Speaker 1: some parts of the coast were close to forty feet
[9:56] Speaker 1: higher than they used to be. Other parts were, you know,
[9:59] Speaker 1: a to eight feet lower than they used to be.
[10:02] Speaker 1: It literally changed the coastline of Alaska as much as
[10:07] Speaker 1: fifty feet in some parts. And this is like, you know,
[10:10] Speaker 1: this is the kind of thing you think of when
[10:11] Speaker 1: you think of an earthquake, like in a movie, Like
[10:14] Speaker 1: you know, train tracks getting curled up, and telephone lines
[10:17] Speaker 1: snapping like toothpicks, and cars being sucked into the earth.
[10:20] Speaker 2: This is the kind of thing that presents a challenge
[10:23] Speaker 2: to the rock.
[10:24] Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, only he could save us, exactly.
[10:27] Speaker 2: Unfortunately he was just a little tike if he was
[10:30] Speaker 2: even born at this time, so he couldn't help anybody.
[10:33] Speaker 2: One of the things that just fascinates me is that
[10:36] Speaker 2: there were entire swaths of forests on the coastline that
[10:41] Speaker 2: dropped into the ocean, not like oh, the lands caving
[10:45] Speaker 2: in and all these these trees are like falling over
[10:48] Speaker 2: down into the ocean. The entire stretch of forest still
[10:53] Speaker 2: standing upright, just plunged downward into the ocean and was
[10:57] Speaker 2: covered by the water. It just dropped. And that to
[11:01] Speaker 2: me just is crazy fascinating. I like anything underwater I
[11:05] Speaker 2: find fascinating, but also the idea of that happening like
[11:08] Speaker 2: that suddenly is just mind boggling to me.
[11:12] Speaker 1: Anything underwater's fascinating.
[11:14] Speaker 2: Anything that's not supposed to be underwater that is underwater.
[11:18] Speaker 1: Ah.
[11:18] Speaker 2: Okay, have you seen the Drowned House?
[11:22] Speaker 1: I don't think so.
[11:24] Speaker 2: It's like a found footage, but it's actually good found footage.
[11:28] Speaker 2: It's an indie film where these scuba divers are exploring
[11:31] Speaker 2: this house that was like at the bottom of a reservoir,
[11:35] Speaker 2: so it's now underwater, and just that alone is awesome,
[11:38] Speaker 2: But the plot's pretty cool too.
[11:39] Speaker 1: So you're going deep with your horror.
[11:44] Speaker 2: I mean, there's just so much bad horror out there
[11:47] Speaker 2: that you really have to hunt.
[11:50] Speaker 1: Yeah, and I didn't mean that to be a pun.
[11:53] Speaker 2: By the way, going deep with the horror, yeah underwater?
[11:57] Speaker 2: Oh oh yeah, German part of me, I'm taking everything
[12:01] Speaker 2: quite literally. There's no such thing as anything funny.
[12:06] Speaker 1: You know, we're going to talk a lot about the
[12:08] Speaker 1: effects of the water, because again it's some pretty like
[12:12] Speaker 1: devastating and remarkable stuff happened. I was right, It was
[12:16] Speaker 1: only about fifteen people were killed from the actual earthquake.
[12:19] Speaker 1: Most of the people died in the tsunamis that followed, right.
[12:22] Speaker 1: There was one big one and a lot of smaller ones.
[12:25] Speaker 1: I think the big one reached a wave reached a
[12:28] Speaker 1: height of about two hundred feet, which is incredible to
[12:32] Speaker 1: think about it. You know, as far south as California,
[12:36] Speaker 1: like twelve people died in California from an earthquake that
[12:41] Speaker 1: happened in Alaska.
[12:42] Speaker 2: Yeah, I went southward. It also went westward, went right
[12:46] Speaker 2: past Hawaii all the way to Japan. It it kind
[12:49] Speaker 2: of petered out by the time it hit Japan. But
[12:52] Speaker 2: I mean, like that's a long way for a single
[12:54] Speaker 2: wave to travel. I mean two hundred feet that's just nuts.
[12:58] Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, this is a big wave.
[13:01] Speaker 2: It is. It's a giant So with a tsunami, though,
[13:05] Speaker 2: you have a really long time, you kind of have
[13:08] Speaker 2: some warning after an earthquake, you can expect if you're
[13:11] Speaker 2: along the coast that a tsunami is probably coming, so
[13:14] Speaker 2: you can get away from that. The problem was is
[13:17] Speaker 2: that all sorts of different towns and communities along the
[13:20] Speaker 2: coast got swamped like almost immediately with tsunamis, not two
[13:25] Speaker 2: hundred foot tsunamis, but still enough to like reck an
[13:27] Speaker 2: entire town. And that was another thing that kind of
[13:31] Speaker 2: the science finally got to the bottom of. But in
[13:34] Speaker 2: some of these tsunamis, like for example, there's a village
[13:37] Speaker 2: called Chenega, and four minutes after the earthquake, it just
[13:43] Speaker 2: got washed away. There were sixty eight people who live there,
[13:46] Speaker 2: twenty three of them died and the only thing that
[13:48] Speaker 2: survived as far as their buildings are concerned, was the schoolhouse,
[13:52] Speaker 2: which was built on higher ground one hundred feet above
[13:55] Speaker 2: sea level. So like everything else in the town was
[13:58] Speaker 2: just gone thanks to a tsunami that hit like lightning fast.
[14:02] Speaker 1: Yeah, I've got one for everyone here. Valdis, at Port Valdiz,
[14:08] Speaker 1: they were, you know, everything kind of along the coastline.
[14:10] Speaker 1: There was obviously swept into the ocean. Thirty two people
[14:14] Speaker 1: very sadly passed in Valdiese and it ended up catching
[14:20] Speaker 1: on fire, the oil tankers and stuff that were there,
[14:24] Speaker 1: and then those were brought out to see so like
[14:27] Speaker 1: you talk about a movie like oil tankers on fire
[14:30] Speaker 1: in a wave being transported across the ocean.
[14:34] Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. And then one of the other problems
[14:36] Speaker 2: with Port Valdez was that the town was built on
[14:39] Speaker 2: sand and gravel, not bedrock. And one of the things
[14:43] Speaker 2: about Omega Thrust earthquake is it liquefies the soil. It
[14:47] Speaker 2: turns what seemed to be totally solid ground into essentially
[14:51] Speaker 2: a liquid and it can swallow stuff up like almost immediately.
[14:54] Speaker 2: So huge parts of that town were also swallowed up
[14:58] Speaker 2: by the earth all of a sudden, like this is
[15:01] Speaker 2: Biblical end Times kind of stuff. You know.
[15:04] Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, at the risk of just going
[15:07] Speaker 1: on and on, I got one more, I think, and
[15:10] Speaker 1: then we can probably take a break. But if you're
[15:12] Speaker 1: talking about Anchorage, you know, the biggest city there that
[15:16] Speaker 1: got you know, an Alaska at least that got hit.
[15:20] Speaker 1: There was a landslide because it also triggered landslides. We
[15:22] Speaker 1: should have mentioned that, and the entire business district sank
[15:26] Speaker 1: about nine feet. There were some building collapses, to be sure,
[15:30] Speaker 1: but others just look kind of like the forest just dropped,
[15:33] Speaker 1: like you know, anywhere from nine to twenty feet below
[15:37] Speaker 1: ones that were just on the other side of the street.
[15:39] Speaker 2: Did you see photos of that?
[15:41] Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Life magazine has a I mean there's a
[15:43] Speaker 1: ton of good photos online that are just kind of
[15:46] Speaker 1: hard to wrap your head around, like what you're looking
[15:48] Speaker 1: at sometimes.
[15:48] Speaker 2: Yeah, it takes a section for sure, like one of
[15:51] Speaker 2: those three d I posters, but with earthquake stuff instead.
[15:55] Speaker 1: We did a whole episode on those.
[15:57] Speaker 2: We did, and if I remember correctly, that was pretty interesting.
[16:00] Speaker 1: Yeah, the magic I think.
[16:03] Speaker 2: You want to take that break you mentioned.
[16:05] Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll take a break and talk about sort of
[16:07] Speaker 1: what happened after right after this.
[16:31] Speaker 2: So four minutes later, the earthquake stops, but there's still tsunamis,
[16:37] Speaker 2: there's fires at sea, even like whole towns of collapse,
[16:41] Speaker 2: Like it takes a little while for the dust to
[16:43] Speaker 2: finally settle. When it does, I think, like the next day,
[16:49] Speaker 2: Lyndon Johnson, who was president at the time, said, Alaska
[16:52] Speaker 2: as a whole is a major disaster area. Remember I said,
[16:56] Speaker 2: like telephone poles snapped and there were no roads anymore
[17:00] Speaker 2: or railroads. That meant that people couldn't communicate with the
[17:05] Speaker 2: outside world. So if you had family and friends outside
[17:08] Speaker 2: of Alaska and they heard about this earthquake, they couldn't
[17:11] Speaker 2: get in touch with you, and you couldn't get in
[17:13] Speaker 2: touch with them. So it was a very hairy time
[17:15] Speaker 2: for a lot of people until they could find out
[17:18] Speaker 2: whether their loved ones were alive or not. And I
[17:20] Speaker 2: think that damage is something like three billion dollars in
[17:23] Speaker 2: today's dollars. Yeah, which again, like this is a state
[17:27] Speaker 2: with like a population of I think two hundred and
[17:29] Speaker 2: fifty thousand people at the time, Like it was not
[17:32] Speaker 2: populated at all, but that's how much damage that earthquake did.
[17:37] Speaker 1: Still, Yeah, they had to you know, I mentioned earlier
[17:41] Speaker 1: that it changed the shape of Alaska and its coastline.
[17:44] Speaker 1: It was so drastic that they had to kind of
[17:47] Speaker 1: redraw the shipping lanes and say like hey, like you
[17:51] Speaker 1: can't go that way anymore because of this, and they
[17:54] Speaker 1: had to kind of, you know, redraw all of that area.
[17:58] Speaker 1: Some people were, you know, Alaska strong, so we're not leaving.
[18:02] Speaker 1: We're gonna build on top of where we were. Other
[18:04] Speaker 1: people said, you know what, I'm going to go higher.
[18:08] Speaker 1: Entire towns were gone and then popped up in other places,
[18:12] Speaker 1: and Valdis is a great example because the Army Corps
[18:16] Speaker 1: of Engineers came in and said, you know, Josh Clark
[18:19] Speaker 1: one day will say that this was built on a
[18:21] Speaker 1: gravel foundation, so you shouldn't even rebuild there. And there
[18:24] Speaker 1: were only about five hundred, you know, plus or minus
[18:27] Speaker 1: people living there at the time, and they said, you
[18:29] Speaker 1: got three years to get out of here. We got
[18:32] Speaker 1: a new Valdis for you about four miles away, and
[18:35] Speaker 1: that's generally what happened. People left set up the new
[18:40] Speaker 1: town of Valdis, which now has close to four thousand people,
[18:43] Speaker 1: and they burned the rest of what was there down
[18:46] Speaker 1: just to make sure that people didn't kind of like
[18:49] Speaker 1: set up and squat there.
[18:50] Speaker 2: Yeah, it's kind of cool. You can go hike the
[18:53] Speaker 2: old Valdis town. There's an intersection still of the two
[18:57] Speaker 2: main drags, and I think, like there's the street sign
[19:00] Speaker 2: up still and then they have plaques showing what used
[19:03] Speaker 2: to be where. It looks like a pretty cool hike.
[19:06] Speaker 1: Yeah.
[19:07] Speaker 2: So, Chuck, we talked about how this kind of changed science.
[19:12] Speaker 2: I think we should really kind of expand on that
[19:14] Speaker 2: because it really changed science. Chuck.
[19:18] Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, this next part we need to
[19:20] Speaker 1: think specifically, I think Livia used a Smithsonian Magazine article
[19:24] Speaker 1: by Christian Elliott for this part. So big thanks to
[19:28] Speaker 1: Christian Elliot for all the hard work and Livia so
[19:32] Speaker 1: well of course in Libya always she's our north star
[19:35] Speaker 1: after all. But you know, we've already kind of said it,
[19:39] Speaker 1: but I guess more specifically we should say that, you know,
[19:43] Speaker 1: at this time in nineteen sixty four, the idea of
[19:46] Speaker 1: what we knew about plate tectonics was not you know, entrenched,
[19:51] Speaker 1: Like people kind of had a good idea of what
[19:53] Speaker 1: they thought was going on for a long time. People
[19:56] Speaker 1: had been checking out maps and saying like, hey, I
[19:58] Speaker 1: think that this used to be connected right here, and
[20:02] Speaker 1: maybe things stripped it apart, but it was still sort
[20:05] Speaker 1: of being actively debated at the time, and this really
[20:10] Speaker 1: kind of like laid bare, like, yeah, this is not
[20:13] Speaker 1: a hypothesis anymore.
[20:15] Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's crazy to think that plate tectonics
[20:17] Speaker 2: wasn't accepted until the sixties, but that's that's exactly how
[20:21] Speaker 2: it was. So this was such a massive earthquake, it
[20:24] Speaker 2: just presented all sorts of different places where evidence kind
[20:29] Speaker 2: of came along that said, Okay, explain this, what explains
[20:31] Speaker 2: this what explains that? And it turns out that plate
[20:34] Speaker 2: tectonics essentially was the only theory that fit, you know,
[20:39] Speaker 2: that explained how the earth went up here, or how
[20:42] Speaker 2: it sunk here, or how it moved fifty feet onto
[20:45] Speaker 2: the sea here, or why this you know, this town
[20:48] Speaker 2: just got swallowed up. All of this could be explained
[20:51] Speaker 2: by plate tectonics and not the other rival theories. I
[20:55] Speaker 2: think the the other rival theory was that earthquakes were
[20:59] Speaker 2: God's will, and play tectonics just explains it better.
[21:04] Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. This is obviously a gold mine for
[21:08] Speaker 1: the US Geological Survey. So they got people to Alaska
[21:12] Speaker 1: like really quick, and you know, got out all their
[21:16] Speaker 1: do hickeys and whirley gigs and measuring tape, and we're like, hey,
[21:21] Speaker 1: we can really learn a lot from this stuff. You know,
[21:25] Speaker 1: people are being taken care of, so now we need
[21:27] Speaker 1: to kind of figure out what happens moving forward. One
[21:32] Speaker 1: of the interesting things they found, and some of the
[21:35] Speaker 1: stuff gets really really interesting. I think that popped up especially.
[21:38] Speaker 1: I'll just tease out the fungus that's coming among us soon.
[21:43] Speaker 2: Nice.
[21:44] Speaker 1: But they looked at those forests that you were talking
[21:46] Speaker 1: about that sunk below the ocean they you know, filled
[21:50] Speaker 1: up with like sediment and seawater and stuff. And they
[21:52] Speaker 1: were digging around down there trying to just study it.
[21:55] Speaker 1: And they kept digging and they said, you know what,
[21:57] Speaker 1: there's other like below this stuff. We're finding older land plants.
[22:02] Speaker 1: And so this has happened before, you guys, like probably
[22:06] Speaker 1: more than several times over the last like thousands or
[22:10] Speaker 1: millions of years, and it's gonna happen again.
[22:13] Speaker 2: Yeah, can't you kind of just see like if you
[22:15] Speaker 2: sped it up like a forest just sinking into the
[22:18] Speaker 2: sea and then being covered with sediment and a new
[22:20] Speaker 2: forest grows on top of it, and that sinks in
[22:22] Speaker 2: the sea, and if you do it fast enough that
[22:24] Speaker 2: bugs Bunny Powerhouse song just starts playing like it just
[22:27] Speaker 2: becomes a conveyor belt.
[22:29] Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just nuts to think about.
[22:31] Speaker 2: But that's exactly what they found with that. And they
[22:34] Speaker 2: found that from the Alaska earthquake. And they were like, Okay,
[22:36] Speaker 2: didn't know that this happened. Now that we know this,
[22:40] Speaker 2: this is a thing, we can start looking for it
[22:41] Speaker 2: in other places we think are earthquake prone. And they
[22:45] Speaker 2: started looking around and they found it in other places
[22:48] Speaker 2: as a matter of fact, the big one along the
[22:50] Speaker 2: Cascadian subduction zone that threatens California every moment of every day.
[22:57] Speaker 2: We know about that thanks to the science that they
[23:01] Speaker 2: figured out thanks to the Alaska earthquake of sixty four.
[23:05] Speaker 1: Yeah, at birthed a new science in paleo seismology, which
[23:09] Speaker 1: is that I meaning that didn't happen every day. We
[23:11] Speaker 1: try all the time to birth new sciences and no
[23:14] Speaker 1: one's listening.
[23:15] Speaker 2: Now, but we don't have cool names like paleo seismology
[23:18] Speaker 2: or megathrust, and maybe we should rethink things.
[23:20] Speaker 1: That's true. Mega thrust is the sexiest science.
[23:23] Speaker 2: Yeah, it sounds like a Guar album.
[23:26] Speaker 1: Oh it does actually.
[23:27] Speaker 2: Yeah. Another thing was that we kind of talked about
[23:30] Speaker 2: that we didn't really understand before were tsunamis title waves,
[23:35] Speaker 2: And of course we knew about tsunamis and title waves,
[23:37] Speaker 2: and I guess science has kind of had a pretty
[23:40] Speaker 2: decent grasp. I'm like, Okay, an epicenter of a major
[23:45] Speaker 2: earthquake out at sea is going to send a tsunami
[23:47] Speaker 2: and maybe we can't even calculate how long it'll take
[23:50] Speaker 2: to get there and all that stuff. But they were
[23:53] Speaker 2: baffled by why some of these coastal areas were hit
[23:56] Speaker 2: by tsunamis within just a couple of minutes of the earthquake.
[24:00] Speaker 2: It just did not fit into the understanding of tidal
[24:02] Speaker 2: waves at the time.
[24:04] Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. So they you know, did some literal
[24:07] Speaker 1: digging and some figurative digging, and they came to this
[24:12] Speaker 1: was the unique shape of Alaska's coastline at the time,
[24:16] Speaker 1: where you know, very jagged and you'd have some deep
[24:18] Speaker 1: fiords where glaciers had cut into the land that would
[24:22] Speaker 1: send silts onto the ocean floor. And the quake just
[24:26] Speaker 1: kind of stirred all this stuff up, like you know,
[24:29] Speaker 1: sand in a glass that had been settled down there
[24:32] Speaker 1: for centuries and centuries. And these were basically underwater landslides
[24:37] Speaker 1: that caused these waves. So it was I think that
[24:41] Speaker 1: a new term was birth, which was land landslide tsunami.
[24:45] Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's like dropping something heavy in a bathtub
[24:48] Speaker 2: and preduke like that. But it's a little different, but
[24:52] Speaker 2: the same thing kind of.
[24:54] Speaker 1: That's right. And you man, you got to tell them
[24:56] Speaker 1: about this spungus.
[24:56] Speaker 2: This is it I hard to believe, this is yours.
[24:59] Speaker 2: I'll tee it up for you, all right, there is
[25:01] Speaker 2: a mystery with some fungus. Get to it.
[25:06] Speaker 1: Yeah, so Crypto caucus, that's pretty easy. Cryptoccus Gatti too,
[25:12] Speaker 1: TI's two eyes.
[25:13] Speaker 2: No is Cryptococcus Gotti?
[25:16] Speaker 1: Yeah, I got Ti? That's right. And how you have
[25:18] Speaker 1: to say it?
[25:19] Speaker 2: I think so, but you have to go up really high.
[25:21] Speaker 1: Pitched got te. So this is a microscopic fungus. It
[25:27] Speaker 1: can be pretty bad. It can cause fatal infections. But
[25:30] Speaker 1: it's like this native to the tropics, So Alaska's like,
[25:33] Speaker 1: we don't have to worry about that kind of thing. Sure,
[25:35] Speaker 1: it grows on rotting wood in the tropics, and apparently
[25:39] Speaker 1: it survives pretty well in seawater. At the turn of
[25:42] Speaker 1: the twentieth century, apparently some of this fungus ended up
[25:45] Speaker 1: among us and by way of a ballast in the
[25:49] Speaker 1: water of a ship that was going on a route
[25:52] Speaker 1: from Brazil to Vancouver and off the coast of the
[25:55] Speaker 1: Pacific northwest there. Once this stuff was spilled out of
[25:59] Speaker 1: that ballast, it said, Hey, we like the seawater. We're
[26:03] Speaker 1: going to adapt and we're here. You don't know we're
[26:05] Speaker 1: here yet, but we're going to be here. In nineteen
[26:07] Speaker 1: sixty four, when this tsunami happens, and it's going to
[26:10] Speaker 1: spread us now far and wide, right, Yeah.
[26:14] Speaker 2: I mean that tsunami took this stuff that had just
[26:16] Speaker 2: been hanging out off the coast that no one even
[26:18] Speaker 2: knew was there except maybe that ship captain if he
[26:22] Speaker 2: was nefarious, that's right, and just spread it inland. This
[26:25] Speaker 2: is nineteen sixty four, and now all of a sudden,
[26:27] Speaker 2: the fungus is like, Okay, we're in a new habitat,
[26:30] Speaker 2: new ecosystem. Let's get to adapting here. And it did.
[26:33] Speaker 2: It survived that tsunami and started to readapt to life
[26:37] Speaker 2: on land, but life on land in the tundra essentially.
[26:42] Speaker 2: And so as that stuff started adapting and adapting, by
[26:46] Speaker 2: the nineties it was capable of infecting people again. And
[26:50] Speaker 2: there was this mysterious outbreak of Cryptococcus gati and they
[26:55] Speaker 2: could not figure out what the heck was going on because,
[26:57] Speaker 2: as far as anybody knew, the only place you found
[27:00] Speaker 2: that was in the tropics on rotting wood. I guess
[27:03] Speaker 2: some epidemiologists kind of put two and two together based
[27:07] Speaker 2: on the tsunami. He was like, basically, the only way
[27:10] Speaker 2: you could have taken this stuff and gotten it all
[27:13] Speaker 2: over the land is from a tsunami, so he figured
[27:16] Speaker 2: that's what happened.
[27:17] Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's I just I would love to know
[27:20] Speaker 1: more about the story of how they traced it to
[27:22] Speaker 1: this one ship that went from Brazil to Vancouver. You know,
[27:27] Speaker 1: obviously shipping records, but it's still like quite a bit
[27:30] Speaker 1: of scientific detective work.
[27:31] Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, for sure. And I'm not sure if
[27:34] Speaker 2: he figured that part out too or not, but I
[27:36] Speaker 2: know that I was reading in that article by Christian
[27:40] Speaker 2: Elliott in Smithsonian. He's talking about how the guy figured
[27:43] Speaker 2: out how it got onto land at least.
[27:45] Speaker 1: Yeah, pretty cool. All right, So we'll take our final
[27:48] Speaker 1: break here and we'll talk about maybe a silver lining
[27:51] Speaker 1: that came out of this right after this, all right. So,
[28:16] Speaker 1: you know, anytime something like this happens, there is usually
[28:19] Speaker 1: a scientific silver lining as far as just learning, you know,
[28:22] Speaker 1: about things that took place, learning how to maybe not
[28:26] Speaker 1: prevent in the future, but at least get more lead
[28:29] Speaker 1: time in the future. And then also and most importantly
[28:32] Speaker 1: probably is like how to build and where to build
[28:34] Speaker 1: moving forward.
[28:35] Speaker 2: Yeah, and the Alaska earthquake taught us not there, Nope,
[28:41] Speaker 2: not there either, Yeah, not there, not there, And it
[28:45] Speaker 2: just goes on like that, right, But people were like, no,
[28:47] Speaker 2: we want to build there. So one of the things
[28:49] Speaker 2: that we learned how to do was to number one,
[28:52] Speaker 2: figure out where not to build, but also how to
[28:55] Speaker 2: build so that like buildings just didn't immediately call apps
[29:00] Speaker 2: and whole towns weren't just swallowed up at the drop
[29:02] Speaker 2: of a richter. You know.
[29:04] Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, Alaska as a state started adopting you know,
[29:10] Speaker 1: obviously new building codes, and you know, especially if it
[29:15] Speaker 1: was like a big building, if it was like a
[29:17] Speaker 1: like a large apartment building, which I mean I don't
[29:20] Speaker 1: think Alaska has a ton of those, but you know,
[29:22] Speaker 1: larger buildings. They are now kind of neck and neck
[29:27] Speaker 1: with California for having the strictest building codes, and it's
[29:31] Speaker 1: worked pretty well. There was another big earthquake and Anchorage
[29:33] Speaker 1: in twenty eighteen that injured about one hundred and seventeen people.
[29:37] Speaker 1: That was a seven point zero and caused seventy six
[29:41] Speaker 1: million dollars in damages. But and you know, stuff got destroyed,
[29:44] Speaker 1: like roads and stuff, to be sure, but no one died.
[29:47] Speaker 1: There were no like really serious injuries, and a lot
[29:50] Speaker 1: of those buildings stayed you know upright.
[29:54] Speaker 2: Yeah, And So one reason or one way that they
[29:56] Speaker 2: developed those building codes and also where to build was
[30:00] Speaker 2: the widespread deployment of seismographs. Right. I think in the
[30:05] Speaker 2: nineteen sixty four earthquake, there were only two seismograph stations
[30:08] Speaker 2: in all of Alaska, right, and the oldest one had
[30:12] Speaker 2: been installed sixty years before. Right after that, they started
[30:16] Speaker 2: throwing seismic stations up all over Alaska, around California, in
[30:21] Speaker 2: western Canada, and we started to develop more and more information.
[30:27] Speaker 2: One thing I saw is that the thing that really
[30:30] Speaker 2: got seismographs out there though, was the arms race. The
[30:34] Speaker 2: nuclear arms race.
[30:35] Speaker 1: Oh yeah, we.
[30:36] Speaker 2: Were using seismographs to listen out for other countries secretly
[30:40] Speaker 2: testing nukes, and that that's what we were using them
[30:43] Speaker 2: for initially, and then people were like, huh, let's start
[30:45] Speaker 2: actually listening for earthquakes. So by being able to get
[30:48] Speaker 2: a lot of information about big and small quakes, how
[30:52] Speaker 2: frequently they were, where they were epicentered, we were able
[30:56] Speaker 2: to really kind of zero in and come up with
[30:59] Speaker 2: entire maps of where to build, where not to build.
[31:02] Speaker 2: There's this National Seismic Hazard Map, which is a party
[31:07] Speaker 2: in a map from what I understand, and we have
[31:13] Speaker 2: that thanks to this earthquake in the science that it
[31:15] Speaker 2: kicked off.
[31:16] Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. I think just like less than ten
[31:19] Speaker 1: years later, there were up to ninety seismic stations in
[31:22] Speaker 1: Alaska alone, and then by the mid two thousands, I
[31:28] Speaker 1: think one hundred and ninety seven sites in Alaska and
[31:32] Speaker 1: Western Canada. That was just over like a three year
[31:35] Speaker 1: period through the National Science Foundation's us Array project from
[31:39] Speaker 1: twenty fourteen to twenty seventeen is when they got all
[31:41] Speaker 1: those and then what we learned about, you know, tsunamis
[31:45] Speaker 1: and people living along the coast like that led to
[31:47] Speaker 1: a lot of new information as far as what was
[31:52] Speaker 1: ended up being the National Tsunami Warning Center.
[31:54] Speaker 2: Yeah, we definitely got way better at predicting where tsunamis
[31:58] Speaker 2: would hit, how bad it would be. And one of
[32:00] Speaker 2: the other things too, is I guess people didn't really
[32:03] Speaker 2: realize this, but if you were living on the coast,
[32:05] Speaker 2: probably if you were of European descent, I'll bet if
[32:07] Speaker 2: you were indigenous, you already knew this. But if you
[32:10] Speaker 2: feel an earthquake, go run to high land, Yeah, because
[32:13] Speaker 2: there's probably a tsunami coming within a couple minutes. That
[32:17] Speaker 2: seemed to have been widely understood only after the earthquake
[32:22] Speaker 2: in Alaska, which I guess makes sense if we didn't
[32:24] Speaker 2: understand local tsunamis at the time.
[32:27] Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure they. I think the retreating glaciers are
[32:33] Speaker 1: potentially causing even more trouble as far as today goes
[32:36] Speaker 1: in Alaska. That permafrost could make the land more vulnerable
[32:41] Speaker 1: to you know, destruction. I know, I mentioned the twenty
[32:44] Speaker 1: eighteen one. There was even bigger one just a few
[32:46] Speaker 1: years ago in twenty twenty one, that reached eight point two,
[32:50] Speaker 1: but being Alaska, it was fortunately in a more remote area. Yeah,
[32:55] Speaker 1: and so a lot less damage. That's kind of you know,
[32:57] Speaker 1: the one benefit of Alaska. The reason this one was
[33:00] Speaker 1: so bad, it was because it hit the towns and
[33:02] Speaker 1: cities along.
[33:02] Speaker 2: The coast right exactly for sure. Yeah. And the fossil
[33:07] Speaker 2: fuel industry was joyous because there pipeline, the Trans Alaska Pipeline,
[33:14] Speaker 2: did not suffer much damage in earthquake in two thousand
[33:18] Speaker 2: and two, I.
[33:18] Speaker 1: Think, Yeah, I mean that's one of the big worries
[33:22] Speaker 1: is that there's so much oil activity there in fossil
[33:26] Speaker 1: fuel infrastructure that you know, an another big one that
[33:30] Speaker 1: did a lot of damage to that could cause you know,
[33:34] Speaker 1: big obviously human concerns, but very much could devastate the
[33:39] Speaker 1: region environmentally for sure.
[33:42] Speaker 2: And I mean in part because so the Trans Alaska pipeline.
[33:48] Speaker 2: In this case, it was the Dnali fault that caused
[33:51] Speaker 2: a seven point nine magnitude earthquake the two thousand and
[33:53] Speaker 2: two to one, and that pipeline goes right across the fault.
[33:57] Speaker 2: So yes, it is a very seems like a tenuous
[34:02] Speaker 2: technology as it stands. For sure, you got anything else
[34:06] Speaker 2: about the Alaska earthquake of nineteen sixty four, I do not. Nope, Okay,
[34:13] Speaker 2: I don't either, So I guess that means it's time
[34:15] Speaker 2: for listener mail.
[34:18] Speaker 1: Well, we're going to forego listener mail for the next
[34:20] Speaker 1: couple of weeks to chat a little bit like at
[34:23] Speaker 1: fireside chat about our upcoming sea voyage with Virgin Cruises
[34:29] Speaker 1: above the Valiant Lady, We're going to be taken to see, Okay,
[34:33] Speaker 1: taking and taken to see. We're going from New York
[34:36] Speaker 1: City to Bermuda October second through seventh with our colleagues,
[34:42] Speaker 1: our old pals. You know that we started the stuff
[34:44] Speaker 1: shows with way back in the day, A couple of
[34:46] Speaker 1: which stuff Mom never told you, and stuff they don't
[34:49] Speaker 1: want you to know. We'll be there with us, we'll
[34:51] Speaker 1: be doing a live show, we'll be doing some other stuff.
[34:54] Speaker 1: They keep talking about these other events we're going to do.
[34:56] Speaker 1: I don't know if it's like a trivia night or
[34:58] Speaker 1: definitely like meet and greets and stuff. But we're pretty
[35:01] Speaker 1: excited about it.
[35:02] Speaker 2: Yeah for sure. And I think, did you say we're
[35:05] Speaker 2: going to Bermuda? Yeah, okay, so I think it's worth
[35:09] Speaker 2: saying again we're going to Bermuda on this and it's
[35:11] Speaker 2: going to be a pretty fun five night cruise. And
[35:14] Speaker 2: I believe there's still passages that can be booked, but
[35:17] Speaker 2: they're actually selling like pretty fast. I'm impressed with us, Chuck.
[35:21] Speaker 1: I know, I'm excited. And we just found out, you know,
[35:24] Speaker 1: Matt and Noel and Ben with stuff they don't want
[35:27] Speaker 1: you to know, have been on one of these before.
[35:29] Speaker 1: And they said it was a great time. And they said,
[35:31] Speaker 1: here's a little pro tip. You know, the venue where
[35:35] Speaker 1: we're doing our actual the live podcast portion, you know,
[35:37] Speaker 1: can't fit twenty seven hundred like everybody on board, right,
[35:42] Speaker 1: And they said, hey, pro tip here is when you
[35:45] Speaker 1: get on board, you sign up for the different stuff.
[35:47] Speaker 1: So I think through the app, so they like tell
[35:50] Speaker 1: everybody to get on there and sign up for your
[35:51] Speaker 1: live show. But I think they're also like, they're gonna
[35:54] Speaker 1: have cameras and you can watch it on TV in
[35:56] Speaker 1: your room as well.
[35:57] Speaker 2: Oh, Nate, closed circuit Is there anything more wondrous than
[36:01] Speaker 2: close circuit TV?
[36:03] Speaker 1: I don't know. We should do a show about it.
[36:06] Speaker 2: Yeah, that should be our onboard show, that's right. Yes,
[36:09] Speaker 2: So you can go to Virgin dot com slash Stuff
[36:13] Speaker 2: at Sea.
[36:15] Speaker 1: Right, yeah, or just google Stuff at Sea Virgin Cruises,
[36:19] Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know Cruise. It'll all get you.
[36:21] Speaker 2: There, and there really is no better time to learn
[36:24] Speaker 2: how to walk around with a parrot on your shoulder
[36:26] Speaker 2: than this particular.
[36:27] Speaker 1: Cruise, agreed.
[36:28] Speaker 2: So yeah, So we'll see you guys in October, but
[36:31] Speaker 2: even before then, we'll see you on the next episode
[36:33] Speaker 2: of Stuff you Should Know. And in the meantime you
[36:36] Speaker 2: can send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio
[36:39] Speaker 2: dot com.
[36:43] Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
[36:46] Speaker 1: more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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