Knowing where to go during an evacuation is crucial to survival when you are in a tsunami hazard zone. But how do emergency managers and planners decide where the safe zones are and where to stage assembly areas in a community?
When we feel an earthquake, we can't know right away where it happened. A person occupies one spot, and earthquakes can happen all around us, at different depths.
On Sunday morning at 6:58 Alaska time, we recorded a magnitude 6.4 earthquake 52 miles southwest of Kaktovik. It was, by a wide margin, the largest earthquake ever recorded north of the Brooks Range in Alaska.
Not only do our remote seismic stations need to survive temperatures far below zero, heavy snows, ice, winds, rains, lightning strikes, and warm, muddy summer months, our stations must also withstand abuse from all variety
For decades, there have been tantalizing clues about how we might know when an earthquake will happen. Sometimes, clusters of small earthquakes called foreshock sequences come in the days or weeks before a large earthquake.
Alaska's most recent deadly tsunami struck without warning on November 3, 1994. Witnesses described new steel sheet piles snapping in half as the railway dock, which was being refurbished, suddenly slid away from the shore.
