Alaska Earthquake of 1964

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 https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:35Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:45Josh 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.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 1:58Josh Clark?

  Rest of the podcast, what do you think?

• 2:00Speaker 02

  I think that 60% of the people just stopped listening.

• 2:05Josh Clark?

  Well, they are going to be sorry because this is going to be an interesting episode.

• 2:10Speaker 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.

• 2:21Josh Clark?

  Oh, I was raised on that knowledge. My family talked about it a lot.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  No comment.

• 2:26Josh 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?

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Uh, when's the first time you ever felt an earthquake?

• 2:38Josh Clark?

  Yesterday. Chuck, will you ask me a follow-up question? Will you ask what I was reading while I experienced that first earthquake?

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Well, where were you and what were you reading?

• 2:50Josh Clark?

  I was reading this article about Alaska Earth, the Alaska earthquake of 1964, and I was at home.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Wow, I didn't know that you guys felt a tremor.

• 3:00Josh Clark?

  There was one in Cuba, like a 6.8, and I felt it in central Florida, plain as day.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Wow, I've never, I lived in LA for five years and I never felt a single anything.

• 3:11Josh 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.

• 3:19Speaker 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.

• 3:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah, a lot of people were upset about this, for sure.

• 3:39Speaker 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.

• 3:58Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 3:59Speaker 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?

• 4:17Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I think there was actually in the whole state, something like, um.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  No, no, no, I'm saying how many people it killed was only the.

• 4:23Josh Clark?

  Oh, oh, sorry. I thought you were saying how many people lived in Alaska.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  No, just like the literal earthquake of people in Alaska.

• 4:29Josh Clark?

  I think it was like, yeah, 15 or 16 people. That was it from the actual earthquake. Yeah.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  I wonder why you laughed.

• 4:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that was why, because I thought you were making a joke and I thought it was hilarious.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  So let's get to it, eh?

• 4:43Josh 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?

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, 9.2 was this one, yeah.

• 4:54Josh 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.

• 5:23Speaker 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.

• 5:48Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 5:48Speaker 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.

• 6:10Josh 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.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:41Josh 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.

• 7:02Speaker 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.

• 7:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Um, but it, it runs along the Gulf of Alaska to Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula.

• 7:32Josh Clark?

  Which is an island in Russia.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 7:36Josh 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.

• 8:14Speaker 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.

• 8:45Josh Clark?

  Suddenly moved 60 feet, like in seconds.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just, uh, yeah, that's, it's hard to believe.

• 8:52Josh 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.

• 9:29Speaker 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.

• 10:07Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Can't you see some little Australian kid going, pa, the pond's moving?

• 10:14Speaker 02

  It's a good Australian kid.

• 10:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I thought so too. Uh, so those, uh, what'd you call them? Seash waves?

• 10:20Speaker 02

  Uh, I call them seash waves.

• 10:21Josh 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.

• 10:40Speaker 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.

• 10:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah, something happened. My brain like just ticked into just enough German that I mispronounce stuff a lot now.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Well, I may be wrong too, but uh, cause maybe it's a German word. I have no idea.

• 11:01Josh 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.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 11:10Josh Clark?

  S.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  E.

• 11:11Josh Clark?

  I.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  C.

• 11:12Josh Clark?

  H.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  E E E E.

• 11:15Josh Clark?

  Waves.

• 11:17Speaker 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.

• 11:55Josh Clark?

  This is the kind of thing that presents a challenge to the rock.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Only he could save us.

• 12:00Josh 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,

• 12:40Josh Clark?

  but also the idea of that happening like that suddenly is just mind boggling to me.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Anything underwater is fascinating?

• 12:48Josh Clark?

  Uh, anything that's not supposed to be underwater that is underwater.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Ah, okay.

• 12:53Josh Clark?

  Have you seen The Drowned House?

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't think so.

• 12:58Josh 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.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:09Josh Clark?

  So it's now underwater and just that alone is awesome, but the plot's pretty cool too. So.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Boy, you're going, you're going deep with your horror.

• 13:19Josh Clark?

  I mean, you, there's just so much bad horror out there that you really have to hunt.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:25Josh Clark?

  And.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  And I didn't mean that to be a pun, by the way.

• 13:29Josh Clark?

  Going deep with the horror?

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, underwater.

• 13:32Josh Clark?

  Oh, wow. Yeah, that German part of me, I'm taking everything quite literally. There's no such thing as anything funny.

• 13:39Speaker 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.

• 13:56Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 13:56Speaker 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.

• 14:16Josh 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?

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a big wave.

• 14:35Josh 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

• 15:20Josh 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.

• 15:36Speaker 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.

• 16:08Josh 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?

• 16:39Speaker 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.

• 17:14Josh Clark?

  Did you see photos of that?

• 17:15Speaker 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.

• 17:23Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it takes a second, for sure. I like one of those 3D Eye posters, but with earthquake stuff instead.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  We did a whole episode on those.

• 17:32Josh Clark?

  We did. And if I remember correctly, that was a pretty interesting one.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, the magic eye thing.

• 17:37Josh Clark?

  You want to take that break you mentioned?

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'll take a break and talk about sort of what happened after, right after this.

• 17:57Speaker 02

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• 20:57Josh 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.

• 21:21Josh 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.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:50Josh 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.

• 22:03Speaker 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.

• 22:32Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 22:33Speaker 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.

• 23:16Josh 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.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:32Josh 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.

• 23:43Speaker 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.

• 23:55Josh Clark?

  And Livia.

• 23:57Speaker 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.

• 24:40Josh 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

• 25:23Josh Clark?

  theory was that earthquakes were God's will, and plate tectonics just explains it better.

• 25:29Speaker 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.

• 25:45Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 25:46Speaker 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.

• 26:09Speaker 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.

• 26:38Josh 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?

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just nuts to think about.

• 26:56Josh 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.

• 27:30Speaker 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.

• 27:40Josh Clark?

  No, but we don't have cool names like paleo seismology or mega thrust and maybe we should rethink things.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  That's true. Mega thrust is the sexiest science.

• 27:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it sounds like a Guar album.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Oh, it does, actually.

• 27:52Josh 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.

• 28:29Speaker 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.

• 29:10Josh 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.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  That's right. And you, man, you gotta tell them about this fungus. This is hard to believe.

• 29:23Josh Clark?

  This is yours. I'll tee it up for you.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  All right, tee it up.

• 29:26Josh Clark?

  There is a mystery with some fungus. Get to it.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, so, um, Cryptococcus, that's pretty easy. Cryptococcus gattii, two Ts, two Is.

• 29:38Josh Clark?

  No, no. Cryptococcus gattii.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, gattii, that's right. Isn't that how you have to say it?

• 29:44Josh Clark?

  I think so, but you have to go up really high pitched.

• 29:47Speaker 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.

• 29:59Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 30:00Speaker 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?

• 30:38Josh 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.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 30:49Josh 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

• 31:34Josh 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.

• 31:43Speaker 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.

• 31:57Josh 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.

• 32:11Speaker 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.

• 32:34Josh Clark?

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• 34:35Speaker 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.

• 34:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And the Alaska earthquake taught us not there. Nope, not there either.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:02Josh 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,

• 35:18Josh Clark?

  like, buildings just didn't immediately collapse and whole towns weren't just swallowed up at the drop of a Richter, you know?

• 35:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 35:27Speaker 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.

• 35:45Speaker 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.

• 36:14Josh 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?

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:31Josh 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.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:56Josh 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.

• 37:36Speaker 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

• 37:56Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 37:57Speaker 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.

• 38:14Josh 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.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:33Josh 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.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. They I think the retreating glaciers are potentially causing even more trouble as far as today goes in Alaska.

• 38:57Josh Clark?

  Mm hmm.

• 38:58Speaker 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

• 39:13Speaker 02

  In a more remote area.

• 39:14Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 39:15Speaker 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.

• 39:23Josh 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.

• 39:39Speaker 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.

• 40:01Josh 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.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 40:26Josh Clark?

  You got anything else about the Alaska earthquake of 1964?

• 40:30Speaker 02

  I do not. Nope.

• 40:32Josh Clark?

  Okay, I don't either. So I guess that means it's time for listener mail.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Well, we're going to forego listener mail for the next couple of weeks to chat a little bit, like a fireside chat.

• 40:44Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  About our upcoming sea voyage with Virgin Cruises about the Valiant Lady. We're going to be taken to sea.

• 40:52Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 40:53Speaker 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.

• 41:22Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure. And I think, did you say we're going to Bermuda?

• 41:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:27Josh 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.

• 41:41Speaker 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.

• 42:02Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 42:03Speaker 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.

• 42:17Josh Clark?

  Oh, neat. Closed circuit. Is there anything more wondrous than closed circuit TV?

• 42:23Speaker 02

  I don't know. We should do a show about it.

• 42:26Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that should be our onboard show.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 42:29Josh Clark?

  Yes. So you can go to virgin.com/stuffatsea, right?

• 42:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Or just Google Stuff at Sea, Virgin Cruises, Stuff You Should Know Cruise. It'll all get you there.

• 42:42Josh Clark?

  And there really is no better time to learn how to walk around with a parrot on your shoulder than this particular cruise.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  Agreed.

• 42:49Josh 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].

• 43:03Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 43:19Josh Clark?

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