Pod Insights Stuff You Should Know Alaska Earthquake of 1964 About this episode When a 9.2 quake shoook Alaska in 1964 it was the 2nd largest earthquake ever recorded. This is that story.
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1:35 Speaker 00 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.
1:45 Josh Clark? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know about earthquakes in Alaska in 1964. I'm gonna talk like this.
1:57 Speaker 02 Oh, no.
1:58 Josh Clark? Rest of the podcast, what do you think?
2:00 Speaker 02 I think that 60% of the people just stopped listening.
2:05 Josh Clark? Well, they are going to be sorry because this is going to be an interesting episode.
2:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, this is, um, you know, I had no idea how earthquake prone Alaska is, was and is until doing this kind of research.
2:21 Josh Clark? Oh, I was raised on that knowledge. My family talked about it a lot.
2:25 Speaker 02 No comment.
2:26 Josh Clark? In Toledo. Hey Chuck, I have a question. Will you ask me the first time I was ever in an earthquake or ever felt an earthquake?
2:35 Speaker 02 Uh, when's the first time you ever felt an earthquake?
2:38 Josh Clark? Yesterday. Chuck, will you ask me a follow-up question? Will you ask what I was reading while I experienced that first earthquake?
2:47 Speaker 02 Well, where were you and what were you reading?
2:50 Josh Clark? I was reading this article about Alaska Earth, the Alaska earthquake of 1964, and I was at home.
2:57 Speaker 02 Wow, I didn't know that you guys felt a tremor.
3:00 Josh Clark? There was one in Cuba, like a 6.8, and I felt it in central Florida, plain as day.
3:06 Speaker 02 Wow, I've never, I lived in LA for five years and I never felt a single anything.
3:11 Josh Clark? Yeah, I, I pretty much assumed I would go the rest of my life without feeling an earthquake and nope. Nope, Cuba had other ideas.
3:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, I mean, after reading about how like far away, like there's some pretty startling stuff in this episode, like as far as how far away you could feel things and like the, uh, the upset that it caused like around the world, it's nuts.
3:36 Josh Clark? Yeah, a lot of people were upset about this, for sure.
3:39 Speaker 02 All right, well, we're talking about the Good Friday earthquake of 1964 in Alaska, which at the time was the biggest, uh, well, the second largest ever in the world that they had recorded at 9.2, just behind the 9.5 that hit Chile in 1960.
3:58 Josh Clark? Yeah.
3:59 Speaker 02 And considering the devastation that happened in Alaska, and probably only because it happened in Alaska, um, it only killed 131 people, which is a lot, but, um, I think the earthquake itself in Alaska, how many people? It's like 15 people, maybe?
4:17 Josh Clark? Yeah, I think there was actually in the whole state, something like, um.
4:21 Speaker 02 No, no, no, I'm saying how many people it killed was only the.
4:23 Josh Clark? Oh, oh, sorry. I thought you were saying how many people lived in Alaska.
4:26 Speaker 02 No, just like the literal earthquake of people in Alaska.
4:29 Josh Clark? I think it was like, yeah, 15 or 16 people. That was it from the actual earthquake. Yeah.
4:35 Speaker 02 I wonder why you laughed.
4:36 Josh Clark? Yeah, that was why, because I thought you were making a joke and I thought it was hilarious.
4:41 Speaker 02 So let's get to it, eh?
4:43 Josh Clark? Well, there was one other big thing about this earthquake besides just the massiveness. I mean, 9.5, that is awfully close to as high as you can go on the Richter scale, right?
4:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, 9.2 was this one, yeah.
4:54 Josh Clark? 9.2, sorry, Chile was the 9.5. Still, not, nothing to sneeze at, right? Second largest earthquake on record. One of the other reasons that it's important or significant is because it basically opened up the door for seismology and our understanding of earthquakes and tsunamis and basically everything we know about those things today kind of kicked off with this 1964 earthquake because we were able to like go study it. It happened at just the right time in a sense.
5:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. Uh, 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. Um, 10 out of the 10 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 as, um, other ones, probably the Japanese tsunami one as well.
5:48 Josh Clark? Sure.
5:48 Speaker 02 Um, but this, uh, mega thrust earthquake is what happens when you have two tectonic plates, um, hitting one another. And in the case of the mega thrust, the heavier one slides below the lighter one and that heavier, uh, plate just dives into the mantle. It's, uh, you know, we talked about subduction a lot, but it subdues.
6:10 Josh Clark? Right. Um, yeah, it's subdued by the top one, right? And as it goes further and further in, like the whole, um, earth's crust gets recycled over incredible spans of time. The problem is what causes a mega thrust earthquake is that in some places that subdued plate doesn't go down. It locks with the, the plate on top when they converge and they just press and press and press and press. And then eventually one of them's going to give. It's like a game of chicken or something like that.
6:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
6:41 Josh Clark? And when they give, it just slips and it slips. Really quickly and the entire, an entire region of earth suddenly lurches forward like 50 feet. And when that happens, that's where you get like 10 out of the 10 most powerful earthquakes. That's where they come from. They're all mega thrust earthquakes and that's how they're produced.
7:02 Speaker 02 That's right. Uh, the one in 64 in Alaska was at the Alaska Aleutian Subduction Zone. And that's where the, the plates here in North America slide over the Pacific plates is where they meet one another. And I think it runs from the Gulf of Alaska. And as we'll see, the epicenter was kind of right there on the waterfront almost.
7:27 Josh Clark? Yeah.
7:27 Speaker 02 Um, but it, it runs along the Gulf of Alaska to Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula.
7:32 Josh Clark? Which is an island in Russia.
7:34 Speaker 02 That's right.
7:36 Josh Clark? Um, yeah, it's, it's basically like the worst place to live. But at the time when people were settling along Alaska, Seward and, um, uh, what was the other big city that was affected by this? Anchorage? And then a bunch of other slightly smaller cities. Uh, they, they didn't know that the subduction zone existed. It's nothing you can walk up to and point to. This thing exists under the oceans off, offshore. So they didn't know, but they found out in a big way after this earthquake that, oh yeah, actually, there's a subduction zone. And as a matter of fact, the whole theory of plate tectonics is correct. This was another thing that it proved or showed.
8:14 Speaker 02 Yeah. So, um, 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. Uh, they said that the plates moved, they estimate between 30 to 60 feet. Uh, kind of all at the same time. And that the area that moved. This is staggering, was 500 miles by 125 miles.
8:45 Josh Clark? Suddenly moved 60 feet, like in seconds.
8:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's just, uh, yeah, that's, it's hard to believe.
8:52 Josh Clark? Right. And so again, like the, this 500 by 125 mile chunk, Anchorage, Valdez, sorry, Valdez, uh, Seward, uh, and a bunch of other towns are like on that chunk of land that suddenly lurched forward. So not only did the land lurch, it, this, this earthquake just had all sorts of crazy effects. Um, in part because the earthquake itself, 9.2 lasted for like four minutes. Four minutes of a 9.2 earthquake sounds terrifying and crazy destructive.
9:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, this was on March 27th of that year, uh, at about 5:30, 6:00 PM is when it kicked off. And, you know, when I talked about like how far reaching it was, uh, here are some like pretty startling examples. Uh, there were water level changes registered across every, uh, United States state, except for Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware. And when you see things like a well or a pond sloshing back and forth, like water that doesn't normally move around, uh, is, is being moved, those are called seash waves. And those were reported as far away as Australia and South Africa.
10:07 Josh Clark? Yeah. Can't you see some little Australian kid going, pa, the pond's moving?
10:14 Speaker 02 It's a good Australian kid.
10:15 Josh Clark? Yeah, I thought so too. Uh, so those, uh, what'd you call them? Seash waves?
10:20 Speaker 02 Uh, I call them seash waves.
10:21 Josh Clark? Seash waves. Okay. So, um, uh, in the Gulf, the Gulf of Mexico, um, fishing boats sank off Louisiana because those seash waves sloshing back and forth in the Gulf of Mexico was so potent that it swamped some boats and sank them. In the Gulf of Mexico, which is nowhere near Alaska.
10:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, it swayed the Space Needle. And by the way, you maybe have been reading too much German on the show, because I think it probably would be seiche in German.
10:50 Josh Clark? Yeah, something happened. My brain like just ticked into just enough German that I mispronounce stuff a lot now.
10:57 Speaker 02 Well, I may be wrong too, but uh, cause maybe it's a German word. I have no idea.
11:01 Josh Clark? 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.
11:09 Speaker 02 Okay.
11:10 Josh Clark? S.
11:11 Speaker 02 E.
11:11 Josh Clark? I.
11:12 Speaker 02 C.
11:12 Josh Clark? H.
11:14 Speaker 02 E E E E.
11:15 Josh Clark? Waves.
11:17 Speaker 02 Just want to get the end. Uh, yeah, that thing rocked the Space Needle, which is about a thousand miles away. And um, they did, you know, geological surveys afterward. They showed some parts of the coast. Were close to 40 feet higher than they used to be. Other parts were, you know, up to eight feet lower than they used to be. It literally changed the, the coastline of Alaska, uh, as much as 50 feet in some parts. And this is like, you know, this is the kind of thing you think of when you think of an earthquake like in a movie, like, you know, train tracks getting curled up and telephone lines snapping like toothpicks and cars being sucked into the earth.
11:55 Josh Clark? This is the kind of thing that presents a challenge to the rock.
11:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. Only he could save us.
12:00 Josh Clark? Exactly. Unfortunately, he was just a little tyke if he was even born at this time. So he couldn't help anybody. Uh, 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 land's caving in and all these, these trees are like falling over down into the ocean. The entire stretch of forest still standing upright, just plunged downward into the ocean and was covered by the water. It just dropped. And um, that to me just is crazy fascinating. I, like anything underwater, I find fascinating,
12:40 Josh Clark? but also the idea of that happening like that suddenly is just mind boggling to me.
12:46 Speaker 02 Anything underwater is fascinating?
12:48 Josh Clark? Uh, anything that's not supposed to be underwater that is underwater.
12:52 Speaker 02 Ah, okay.
12:53 Josh Clark? Have you seen The Drowned House?
12:56 Speaker 02 Uh, I don't think so.
12:58 Josh Clark? It's like a found footage, but it's actually good found footage. Um, it's an indie film where these scuba divers are exploring this house that was like at the bottom of a, a reservoir.
13:09 Speaker 02 Okay.
13:09 Josh Clark? So it's now underwater and just that alone is awesome, but the plot's pretty cool too. So.
13:15 Speaker 02 Boy, you're going, you're going deep with your horror.
13:19 Josh Clark? I mean, you, there's just so much bad horror out there that you really have to hunt.
13:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:25 Josh Clark? And.
13:26 Speaker 02 And I didn't mean that to be a pun, by the way.
13:29 Josh Clark? Going deep with the horror?
13:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, underwater.
13:32 Josh Clark? Oh, wow. Yeah, that German part of me, I'm taking everything quite literally. There's no such thing as anything funny.
13:39 Speaker 02 Uh, you know, we're going to talk a lot about the, um, the effects of the water, uh, because again, some pretty like devastating and remarkable stuff happened. I was right. It was only about 15 people were killed from the actual earthquake. Most of the people died in the tsunamis that followed.
13:56 Josh Clark? Right.
13:56 Speaker 02 There was one big one and a lot of smaller ones. And I think the big one reached a wave, reached a height of about 200 feet, which is incredible to think about. It, you know, as far south as California, like 12 people died in California from an earthquake that happened in Alaska.
14:16 Josh Clark? Yeah, it went southward. It also went, uh, westward, went right past Hawaii, all the way to Japan. It had kind of petered out by the time it hit Japan, but I mean, like, that's a long way for a single wave to travel. I mean, 200 feet, that's just nuts, right?
14:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's a big wave.
14:35 Josh Clark? It is. It's a giant. So, um, 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 200 foot tsunamis, but still enough to like wreck an entire town. And that was another thing that, um, that kind of the science finally got to the bottom of. But in some of these, um, tsunamis, like, for example, there's a village called Chenega. And four minutes after the earthquake, it just got washed away. There were 68 people
15:20 Josh Clark? who lived there. 23 of them died. And the only thing that survived as far as their buildings are concerned was the schoolhouse, which was built on higher ground, 100 feet above sea level. So like, everything else in the town was just gone, thanks to a tsunami that hit like, lightning fast.
15:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, I've got one for everyone here. Valdez, at Port Valdez, they were, you know, everything kind of along the coastline there was obviously swept into the ocean. 32 people very sadly passed in Valdez. And it ended up catching on fire, the oil tankers and stuff that were there. And then those were brought out to sea. So like, you talk about a movie, like, oil tankers on fire, in a wave, being transported across the ocean.
16:08 Josh Clark? Yeah, for sure. And then one of the other problems with Port Valdez was that the town was built on sand and gravel, not bedrock. And one of the things about a mega 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. 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?
16:39 Speaker 02 Yeah. And, you know, at the risk of just going on and on, I got one more, I think, and then we can probably take a break. But if you're talking about Anchorage, you know, the biggest city there that got, you know, in Alaska at least, that got hit. There was a landslide, because it also triggered landslides, we should have mentioned that. And the entire business district sank about nine feet. There were some building collapses, to be sure, but others just, kind of like the forest, just dropped, like, you know, anywhere from nine to 20 feet below ones that were just on the other side of the street.
17:14 Josh Clark? Did you see photos of that?
17:15 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. Life Magazine has a, I mean, there's a ton of good photos online that are just, kind of hard to wrap your head around, like, what you're looking at sometimes.
17:23 Josh Clark? Yeah, it takes a second, for sure. I like one of those 3D Eye posters, but with earthquake stuff instead.
17:30 Speaker 02 We did a whole episode on those.
17:32 Josh Clark? We did. And if I remember correctly, that was a pretty interesting one.
17:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, the magic eye thing.
17:37 Josh Clark? You want to take that break you mentioned?
17:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, we'll take a break and talk about sort of what happened after, right after this.
17:57 Speaker 02 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
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20:57 Josh Clark? So, four minutes later, the earthquake stops, but there's still tsunamis, there's fires at sea, even like whole towns have collapsed. 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 as a whole is a major disaster area.
21:21 Josh Clark? Remember I said like telephone poles snapped and there were no roads anymore, or railroads? That meant that people couldn't communicate with the outside world. So if you had family and friends outside of Alaska and they heard about this earthquake, they couldn't get in touch with you and you couldn't get in touch with them. So it was a very hairy time for a lot of people until they could find out whether their loved ones were alive or not. And I think that damage is something like $3 billion in today's dollars.
21:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
21:50 Josh Clark? Which again, like this is a state with like a population of I think 250,000 people at the time. Like it was not populated at all. But that's how much damage that earthquake did still.
22:03 Speaker 02 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 redraw all of that area. Some people were, you know, Alaska strong, so we're not leaving. We're going to build on top of where we were. Other people said, you know what, I'm going to go higher.
22:32 Josh Clark? Right.
22:33 Speaker 02 Entire towns were gone and then popped up in other places. And Valdez is a great example because the Army Corps of Engineers came in and said, you know, Josh Clark one day will say that this is built on a gravel foundation. So you shouldn't even rebuild there. And there were only about 500, you know, plus or minus some people living there at the time. And they said, you got three years to get out of here. We got a new Valdez for you about four miles away. And that's generally what happened. People, people left, set up the new town of Valdez, which now has close to 4,000 people. And they, 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.
23:16 Josh Clark? Yeah, it's kind of cool. You can go hike the old Valdez town. There's an intersection still of the two main drags. And I think like there's the street sign up still. And then they have plaques showing what used to be where it looks like a pretty cool hike.
23:31 Speaker 02 Yeah.
23:32 Josh Clark? 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.
23:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, and you know, this next part, we need to thank specifically, I think Livia used a Smithsonian magazine article by Christian Elliott. For this part, so big thanks to Christian Elliott for all the hard work.
23:55 Josh Clark? And Livia.
23:57 Speaker 02 So, well, of course, and Livia always. She's our North Star after all. But, you know, we've already kind of said it, but I guess more specifically, we should say that, you know, at this time in 1964, the idea of what we knew about plate tectonics was not, you know, entrenched. Like, people kind of had a good idea of what they thought was going on. For a long time, people had been checking out maps and saying like, hey, I think that this used to be connected right here, and maybe things drifted apart, but it was still sort of being actively debated at the time. And this really kind of like laid bare, like, yeah, this is not a hypothesis anymore.
24:40 Josh Clark? Yeah. I mean, it's crazy to think that plate tectonics wasn't accepted until the 60s, 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, that explained how the Earth went up here, or how it sunk here, or how it moved 50 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 that the, the other rival
25:23 Josh Clark? theory was that earthquakes were God's will, and plate tectonics just explains it better.
25:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, I agree. This is obviously a goldmine for the US Geological Survey, so they got people to Alaska like really quick, and, you know, got out all their do-hickeys and whirligigs and measuring tape.
25:45 Josh Clark? Sure.
25:46 Speaker 02 And we're like, hey, we can really learn a lot from this stuff. You know, 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 this stuff gets really, really interesting, I think, that popped up, especially, I'll just tease out the fungus that's coming among us soon.
26:09 Speaker 02 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 every you guys. Like probably more than several times over the last like thousands or millions of years and it's gonna happen again.
26:38 Josh Clark? 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 into the sea? And if you do it fast enough, that Bugs Bunny powerhouse song just starts playing? Like it just becomes a conveyor belt?
26:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's just nuts to think about.
26:56 Josh Clark? 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, 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. We know about that thanks to the science that they figured out, thanks to the Alaska earthquake of 64.
27:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, it birthed a new science in paleo seismology, which is, I mean, that didn't happen every day. We try all the time to birth new sciences and no one's listening.
27:40 Josh Clark? No, but we don't have cool names like paleo seismology or mega thrust and maybe we should rethink things.
27:46 Speaker 02 That's true. Mega thrust is the sexiest science.
27:49 Josh Clark? Yeah, it sounds like a Guar album.
27:51 Speaker 02 Oh, it does, actually.
27:52 Josh Clark? Yeah. Another thing was that we kind of talked about that we didn't really understand before were tsunamis, tidal waves. And of course, we knew about tsunamis and tidal waves and I guess scientists kind of had a pretty decent grasp on like, okay. An epicenter of a major earthquake out at sea is going to send a tsunami and maybe we can 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.
28:29 Speaker 02 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 fjords where glaciers had cut into the land. That would send silt onto the ocean floor. And the quake just 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 birthed, which was landslide tsunami.
29:10 Josh Clark? Yeah, yeah, it's like dropping something heavy in a bathtub and pluk like that. But it's a little different, but the same thing, kinda.
29:19 Speaker 02 That's right. And you, man, you gotta tell them about this fungus. This is hard to believe.
29:23 Josh Clark? This is yours. I'll tee it up for you.
29:25 Speaker 02 All right, tee it up.
29:26 Josh Clark? There is a mystery with some fungus. Get to it.
29:31 Speaker 02 Uh, yeah, so, um, Cryptococcus, that's pretty easy. Cryptococcus gattii, two Ts, two Is.
29:38 Josh Clark? No, no. Cryptococcus gattii.
29:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, gattii, that's right. Isn't that how you have to say it?
29:44 Josh Clark? I think so, but you have to go up really high pitched.
29:47 Speaker 02 Gattii? So this is a microscopic fungus. It can be pretty bad. It can cause fatal infections. But it's like, it's native to the tropics. So Alaska's like, we don't have to worry about that kind of thing.
29:59 Josh Clark? Sure.
30:00 Speaker 02 Um, it grows on rotting wood in the tropics. And apparently it survives pretty well in seawater. At the turn of the 20th 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 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 gonna adapt and we're here. You don't know we're here yet, but we're gonna be here in 1964. When this tsunami happens and it's gonna spread us now far and wide, right?
30:38 Josh Clark? Yeah, I mean, that tsunami took these, 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.
30:48 Speaker 02 That's right.
30:49 Josh Clark? And just spread it inland. This is 1964. 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 on land, but life on land in the tundra, essentially. And so as that that stuff started adapting and adapting, by the 90s, it was capable of infecting people again. And there was this mysterious outbreak of Cryptococcus gattii, and they could not figure out what the heck was going on. Because 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
31:34 Josh Clark? 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.
31:43 Speaker 02 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.
31:57 Josh Clark? 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.
32:11 Speaker 02 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.
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34:35 Speaker 02 All right. So, 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.
34:55 Josh Clark? Yeah. And the Alaska earthquake taught us not there. Nope, not there either.
35:02 Speaker 02 Yeah.
35:02 Josh Clark? 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,
35:18 Josh Clark? like, buildings just didn't immediately collapse and whole towns weren't just swallowed up at the drop of a Richter, you know?
35:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure.
35:27 Speaker 02 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.
35:45 Speaker 02 They are now kind of neck and neck with California for having the strictest building codes. And it's worked pretty well. There was another big earthquake in Anchorage in 2018 that injured about 117 people. It was a 7.0 and caused $76 million in damages, but, and, you know, stuff got destroyed, like roads and stuff, to be sure. But no one died. There were no, like, really serious injuries and a lot of those buildings stayed, you know, upright.
36:14 Josh Clark? 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 1964 earthquake, there are only two seismograph stations in all of Alaska. Right?
36:31 Speaker 02 Yeah.
36:31 Josh Clark? And the, the oldest one had been installed 60 years before. Right after that, they started throwing seismic stations up all over Alaska, around California, in Western Canada. And we started to develop like more and more information. One thing I saw is that the, the, the thing that really got seismographs out there, though, was the, the arms race, the nuclear arms race.
36:55 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
36:56 Josh Clark? We 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, let's start actually listening for earthquakes. So by being able to, to get a lot of information about big and small quakes, how frequent they were, where they were epicentered. We were able to really kind of zero in and come up with entire maps of where to build and where not to build. There's this National Seismic Hazard Map, which is a party in a in a map, from what I understand. And we we have that thanks to this earthquake and the science that it kicked off.
37:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. I think just like less than 10 years later, there were up to 90 seismic stations in Alaska alone. And then by the mid 2000s, I think 197 sites in Alaska and Western Canada. That was just over like a three year period through the
37:56 Josh Clark? Right.
37:57 Speaker 02 National Science Foundation's US Array Project from 2014 to 2017 is when they got all those. And then what we learned about, you know, tsunamis and people living along the coast, like that that led to a lot of like new information as far as what was end up being the National Tsunami Warning Center.
38:14 Josh Clark? 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.
38:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:33 Josh Clark? Because there's probably a tsunami coming within a couple minutes. That seemed to have been widely understood only after the the earthquake in Alaska, which I guess makes sense if we didn't understand local tsunamis at the time.
38:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. They I think the retreating glaciers are potentially causing even more trouble as far as today goes in Alaska.
38:57 Josh Clark? Mm hmm.
38:58 Speaker 02 That permafrost could make the land more vulnerable to, you know, destruction. I know I mentioned the 2018 one. There was even bigger one just a few years ago in 2021 that reached 8.2. But being Alaska, it was
39:13 Speaker 02 In a more remote area.
39:14 Josh Clark? Yeah.
39:15 Speaker 02 And so a lot less damage. That's kind of, you know, the one benefit of Alaska. The reason this one was so bad was because it it hit the towns and cities along the coast.
39:23 Josh Clark? Right, exactly, for sure. Yeah, and the fossil fuel industry was joyous because their pipeline, the TransAlaska Pipeline, did not suffer much damage in an earthquake in 2002, I think.
39:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, that's one of the big worries is that there's so much oil activity there and fossil fuel infrastructure that, you know, another 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 region environmentally.
40:01 Josh Clark? For sure. And I mean, in part because so the TransAlaska Pipeline, in this case, it was the Denali Fault that caused a 7.9 magnitude earthquake, the 2002 one, and that pipeline goes right across the fault. So, yes, it is a very, seems like a tenuous technology as it stands.
40:24 Speaker 02 For sure.
40:26 Josh Clark? You got anything else about the Alaska earthquake of 1964?
40:30 Speaker 02 I do not. Nope.
40:32 Josh Clark? Okay, I don't either. So I guess that means it's time for listener mail.
40:38 Speaker 02 Well, we're going to forego listener mail for the next couple of weeks to chat a little bit, like a fireside chat.
40:44 Josh Clark? Okay.
40:45 Speaker 02 About our upcoming sea voyage with Virgin Cruises about the Valiant Lady. We're going to be taken to sea.
40:52 Josh Clark? Okay.
40:53 Speaker 02 Taking and taken to sea. We're going from New York City to Bermuda, October 2nd through 7th, with our colleagues, 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 will 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.
41:22 Josh Clark? Yeah, for sure. And I think, did you say we're going to Bermuda?
41:27 Speaker 02 Yeah.
41:27 Josh Clark? 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.
41:41 Speaker 02 I know. I'm excited. And we just found out, you know, Matt and Noel and Ben with Stuff You Should 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 2,700, like everybody on board.
42:02 Josh Clark? Right.
42:03 Speaker 02 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 were 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 like, watch it on TV in your room as well.
42:17 Josh Clark? Oh, neat. Closed circuit. Is there anything more wondrous than closed circuit TV?
42:23 Speaker 02 I don't know. We should do a show about it.
42:26 Josh Clark? Yeah, that should be our onboard show.
42:28 Speaker 02 That's right.
42:29 Josh Clark? Yes. So you can go to virgin.com/stuffatsea, right?
42:36 Speaker 02 Yeah. Or just Google Stuff at Sea, Virgin Cruises, Stuff You Should Know Cruise. It'll all get you there.
42:42 Josh Clark? And there really is no better time to learn how to walk around with a parrot on your shoulder than this particular cruise.
42:48 Speaker 02 Agreed.
42:49 Josh Clark? 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 [email protected] .
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