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