Alaska's Deadly Waves - Hidden In America - Documentary

Alaska, its wild beauty is legendary, but this vast majestic landscape comes with a price, oh W, it's just a land of all extremes here in the Last Frontier, cataclysmic natural forces come with the territory, the largest earthquake in the northern hemisphere , sounds like a freight train and Coming straight at you, the most massive volcanic eruption of the 20th century. Catm was many, many times larger than Mount St. Helens. The glaciers were larger than a city. Look, the scope and scale of it all is so crazy and the biggest tsunami ever witnessed. Earth and he said: Son, start praying and I did it with such massive forces that they shaped the ground.

It's one of the hardest places to call home on Earth. Welcome to the Alaska Disaster Zone, deep in the rugged Alaska wilderness. Devastating forces are waiting to be unleashed. the most powerful can reshape mountain ranges in seconds and leave entire towns in ruins. California likes to call itself the earthquake capital of the country, but they're not even close. This is a central earthquake. Lori Gillum knows exactly how destructive Alaska earthquakes can be. She has faced the biggest one. one in American history, an earthquake of all time, sounds like a freight train and is coming right at you.

Lor's hometown of Anchorage lies just north of a

deadly

subduction zone where two continental plates collide head-on and one is pulled beneath the other. The Earth's crust is what creates Alaska's largest mountain ranges, but it is also the crucible for the largest and most frequent earthquakes in North America. Alaska averages a staggering 100 earthquakes per day and suffers more earthquakes than the other 49 states combined if a On the list of the largest earthquakes of the last 500 years in what is now the United States and Canada, almost all of them would be Alaska, but the biggest one of all came on March 27, 1964, the day 7-year-old Lori and her sister Debbie were thrown into the 4th Avenue Theater in Anchorage by their mom.

Mom was incredible in that moment of her life she was a housewife and she was a volunteer at the elementary school where my sister and I went and at church she was always there Lori thinks she is about to see Disney's The Sword in the Stone at the cinema, in Instead, you'll have a front-row seat as one of the largest earthquakes in history unfolds. mom bought our tickets, we got popcorn, she sat us in the movie, she left, we didn't. We don't know exactly where he was going, but we thought he would go shopping 80 meters deep, under the ocean floor, the crust begins to break with a force equivalent to 63,000 atomic bombs, it is the epicenter of a massive earthquake that started the earthquake 1964. breaking beneath the sound of Prince William, but within seconds the rupture spreads in the direction of Anchorage, then a city of 100,000 beneath the Fourth Avenue Theater, the Earth begins to shake, the curtains begin, the film begins and Disney begins with the music and the book Once Upon a Time. and the book opens and that's when the earth my sister flies over me throwing her popcorn and starts running down the hallway I run after her and we manage to get out when the earthquake was still rolling Lori, 7 years old, Witnesses The fury of Alaska firsthand we were holding on to the parking meter because at that time the earthquake was really rolling and shaking and we couldn't get up and the flagpole was shaking back and forth and back and forth and you could see the

waves

.

I just walked down Fourth Avenue as I was going down the street, the sidewalk separated from the sidewalk and I thought wow! and it was strong. I remember the noise, it sounds like a freight train and it comes right at you after 4 and a half minutes. The shaking stopped we were a block and a half from the Fourth Avenue slide, where the sidewalk and buildings fell 20 feet and then slid. The damage you see in the photos of Fourth Avenue, for example, was caused by a cliff that basically just collapsed and what was on top just slid down, down a little bit, the theater stands firm, but Just two blocks away, the JC Penny store collapses into the street killing shoppers, the corner of the building collapsing.

I think my sister was fine, four years older. more in tune with what she was going through her concern was that mom was on pennies. Had Lor's family paid the ultimate price for living in this disaster zone? This is where we were supposed to meet Mom at the parking meter. I remember a lady wanted to know. If we were okay and if someone came for us, she felt like we were standing there forever, absolutely forever. I remember she came around the corner and there was my mom and everything was right in the world. Lor's family is one of the lucky ones, but their city is devastated.

The earthquake has a magnitude of 9.2 on the RoR scale, the second largest in the history of the world. What was exceptional about this earthquake was really the size of the area. which slid in 5 minutes, this area, you know, moved 450 Mi long and 150 Mi wide. An average of about 30 feet, the earthquake pushes away entire sections of the seafloor. Jets remain high and dry and coastlines change so radically that maps have to be redrawn; the uplift was as large as 30 feet from the edge of Prince William sounds such enormous amounts of uplift that it suddenly pulls things out of the ocean that also come out of the ocean immediately after the earthquake. 30 foot tsunamis created by the vertical movement of the sea floor.

These giant

waves

devastated southern Alaska and, more distantly, crossed the ocean they hit. Hawaii hit California and so killed people in California from the earthquake in Alaska, the final death toll from the 1964 earthquake and tsunami amounts to more than 130 and although that earthquake is unprecedented in size since it occurred, Alaska It has had no less than six earthquakes. magnitude greater than 7.8, the most recent large magnitude in 2002 split huge glaciers in half and with so many faults in southern Alaska, another earthquake the size of 1964 is not out of the question; Something at the same location of that size is not likely to happen so close to the event, but there are places right next door that could be ripe for a sizable earthquake, so the risk is always there.

One thing is certain, with a population three times larger than it was 50 years ago, modern Alaska has much more to lose. Alaska is a breeding ground. For disasters you have the largest earthquakes in the United States, the tallest mountains, the most massive glaciers, so what happens when all these forces come together? Ask Howard Ulrich Jr., he's the only man alive to have seen it first and I saw this big wave coming in on the The Other Side of Violent I was afraid, you know, it's the biggest wave in the history of the United States. United and potentially in written history.

Louya Bay, a deceptively calm hide in southeast Alaska on July 9, 1958. Howard was only 8 years old when he arrived here. On a fishing trip with his father, my father said it was a good place to spend the night, but if Howard's father had talked to the natives, maybe he would have reconsidered guiding his boat into this glacier-carved bay, they said There was a monster that lived in Kou Bay and the monster would be upset if there were a lot of people there, Howard doesn't know that he is about to meet that monster, it was very calm, glacier water, ice chunks, icebergs, everything.

You could hear the engine moving, calm and gray waters, the icebergs are gone. even barely making noise 10:15 we're anchored right here so I went to bed and went to sleep I guess and then my dad came down and woke me up and said Son, you'll never see another earthquake like this in your life, a fault in the huge mountains at the head of the Bay has generated a massive earthquake while we are sitting there looking out. I think to our right there was a big explosion, a big boom, 40 million cubic yards of rock and ice dislodged.

Because of the earthquake that plunged into the bay, it also fell from a great height, so when it hit the bay at the head of the bay there was a gigantic Splash. This simulation created by a scientist at the University of California explains what happens after the wipes are splashed. Trees at the adjacent point at a height of more than 1,700 feet It is larger than almost all buildings in the United States It is approximately the size of the new World Trade Center The displaced water becomes a wave of devastating power coming around the other side of the iron and it was a big black mess, it has all this dirt on it, I imagine it was turning it very black and it has these little things sticking out like porcupine quills or something, but those are trees inside the billowing Black Wave.

It's no ordinary wave that comes crashing down on Howard and his father, it's a mega tsunami, the largest ever faced by a human being in recorded history, and my father at that moment threw me the life preserver and said, Son, start to pray and I grabbed it. of the boat and we went up very fast, it was like being in a nice smooth elevator, just going up there were trees below us, we went up this hill and then we came back down miraculously Howard and his father survived, but two other boats in the bay are destroyed, two survivors are later rescued from a lifeboat, two other people are never seen again for thinking you were going to die one minute and then you survived.

Yes, we were very lucky and these people were not dispossessed by the 100 foot wave. trees along the coast to Bedrock, scientists deduce that this is not the first time it has happened and it will not be the last. Tuya Bay actually has a whole history of big waves and probably all caused by the average large landslides that Lya Bay has had. a mega tsunami every 30 years and the last one happened 56 years ago all hell could break loose at any moment there's another riff up there waiting to happen at any time late when you're in the volatile land of Alaska not everything is as it seems prairie no It's just a prairie, it's a grizzly bear grazing area, a river isn't just a river, it's a salmon superhighway, and sometimes a mountain isn't just a mountain.

We have 52 historically active volcanoes in Alaska, more active volcanoes than anywhere else. In the United States, by far, they range from very large to small and everywhere in between, with large eruptions and small explosions, and everywhere in between Alaska's volcanoes include perfect cones like Mount Cleveland in remote avoidance chain or Mount Augustine in Cook Inlet, but there are also less picturesque but more threatening peaks such as Mount Redout, one of the volcanoes closest to Anchorage. If you see something like Readout with a large open crater on top, that tells me it has more violent eruptions in this disaster zone.

There are three to five eruptions a year here at the Alaska Volcano Observatory. Scientists monitor a 2,000 m long arc of Alaskan volcanoes. They are an explosive side effect of continental plates colliding in the so-called Ring of Fire. We have one plate that is being subducted beneath the other and that is what generates our unique landscape, without that we would not have Alaska-style volcanoes. The state holds the record for the largest eruption of the 20th century in 1912. Mount Catmi exploded with power 30 times stronger than the lower one. The 48's most famous eruption, KMI, was many, many times larger than M St H.

Fortunately, most Alaska volcanoes are not close to where people live, but volcanologist Game M Jimpy has been closer than almost every man alive from an eruption at his most furious. It happened in 1992. On the afternoon of August 18 we received a phone call from the FAA saying that a pilot had reported something was happening at Mount Spur. Spur is about 80 miles west of Anchorage, it is the closest volcano to the city. Jump aboard a small plane to check it out. If the report of an eruption is true then we took off and that day there was a cloud ceiling of about 7,500 feet when we showed up, it was obvious that this was a major eruption as they approached Mount Spur, the game starts rolling with their handicam .

Capturing some of the most violent images of an Alaskan volcano ever seen, it was just thrilling to see these huge cauliflower-shaped clouds of ash coming out of this vent and big blocks the size of Volkswagens and small vans being thrown around, you know, between 500 and 700 m above sea level. The massive eruption spews a column of ash more than 8 miles into the stratosphere and hurls rocks nearly 3 miles away from its crater, but I remember wondering at the time, "We're so close to this and if it was really going to be big". I'm not sure what would happen.

Something else worries the game. The direction in which the wind is taking the ash cloud. We realized that the ashes go to Anchorage, so we have to get over this. The plane in the game lands at the Anchorage airport just before it closes, because if there is something. Alaska airports are not at risk with their cloudsof volcanic ash. The North Pacific air routes are a busy air corridor. There are about 250 flights a day and maybe 30,000 people on those flights and then billions of dollars in cargo and equipment and all those flights go over the active volcanoes in Alaska, so I'm potentially in danger.

I'm standing just inside the internal operations room of the Alaska Volcano Observatory. We use this room, Prim, mainly when we have an eruption from one of the Cook Inlet volcanoes or if there is a large scale eruption elsewhere in Alaska and it is a place where we can sit and at a glance around the room see a lot of different data . There are webcams, seismographs, satellite images, flight trackers and a special red phone. This phone has one purpose and one purpose is to put the people in the options room in direct contact with the people at the Federal Aviation Administration so that in times of volcanic eruption crisis we can talk directly.

Volcanologists know that airplanes and ash clouds can be a bad combination. It's a lesson. the world learned about the skies of Alaska on December 15, 1989 that morning Anchorage's Mount Redout 100 Mil erupts just as a 747 from Holland arrives to land at the Anchorage airport, the plane with 231 passengers flies directly into the cloud of ash, yes it could be little if you put enough ash in the engines, it will remelt and then essentially solidify into glass inside the engine, all four engines caught fire, the plane cabin became very thick with ash for Five to six minutes they were a silent, dark and heavy glider, the pilots were desperately trying to restart the engines and each time they restarted them, they spewed a little more ash from those turbines until they finally managed to start two of those engines and they limped the plane. landed in Anchorage and, miraculously, no one was hurt.

The almost miss shakes everyone up, but she may not be the last. Alaska is crisscrossed by busy international air routes that can choke at any moment, as happened in Iceland in 2010, when a volcano plume landed on 100,000 flights, and there's a good chance Alaska's next eruption will be the largest ever affecting no not only to aviation but to the climate throughout the world. The chances of Alaska experiencing a catastrophic eruption. I think they're pretty good. They occurred in Alaska about every hundred years in the last. One occurred in 1912 CMI, so with as many active volcanoes as we have and it being as tectonically active up here, it's only a matter of time until we have another catm style eruption producing a billion jar gut inspiration and death of tons.

Reinventing the most spectacular of Alaska The terrain to be near the glacier at that type of time would be a terrifying experience. Alaska's majestic mountain ranges are driven by

deadly

tectonic forces, but there is something equally powerful cutting through them. They can be several kilometers wide and tens of kilometers long. and glaciers as thick as skyscrapers, Alaska is home to 20,000 of them and their enormous power is transforming this disaster zone in ways you wouldn't believe. Alaska's glaciers have truly carved out most of the landscape so see how glaciologist Mike Heckers and mountain guide Dawn Riley are on their way to the Menen Hall Glacier to reveal its secrets.

They will try to delve deeper into a potentially deadly ice cave. There's an ice cave up there, so let's check it out and see if it's safe. Get in there, the big danger in an ice cave is that the ceiling will collapse on you, but even before you reach the glacier there are other dangers. This is the terminus of the glacier. It's dangerous to get any closer than this. Oh look. This amateur video taken on Alaska's Holgate Glacier shows why, oh here you go, icebergs break into water and we call it Iceberg. The scale ranges from, you know, ice basketballs falling to basically chunks of ice the size of small towns breaking up.

Oh my god, here comes the water, if you get a big piece hitting then there will be a huge wave, uhoh, uhoh, uhoh, being on a boat near the glacier at that kind of time would be a terrifying experience. Alright, at the so-called extreme, the power of the glacier is more raw and unpredictable, it's like it's sneaking apart, so the ice goes down, it flows by gravity and it's pushed from above and it falls over this cliff and it just breaks. . It's where the glacier ends, but discovering where it begins means going to the source of its immense power on the flanks of the Monumental Menen Hall Towers, a death-defying peak where mountain guide Dawn feels at home, so we are here at 5500 feet. and we are on the Juno Ice Field and up here we have more snow each year than can melt, so once about 90 feet of snow accumulates over the years, its weight alone will compact and form glacial ice and is heavy enough to flow downhill like a river does.

The journey of the ice to the end of the glacier takes 200 years. They are big conveyor belts. They're moving ice down through the mountains, but glaciers carry a secret weapon. Rocks dragged from the mountain. The sides are what allow glaciers to reshape Alaska. The ice itself doesn't sculpt valleys, but rocks embedded in the ice that are dragged down act as a large Brillo platform and simply scrape away the rock beneath for a classic effect. U-shaped valleys where glaciers have been and we can see that up in the Hall of Men they add giant glaciers to ever-changing tectonic plates and you get the extreme landscapes that Alaska is famous for when you get the combination of the tectonics that He puts things together and pushes them up. and the glaciers go through them, then what you get is really steep relief, and so in this very rugged dynamic topography here in Southeast Alaska, you can hardly look anywhere without seeing how the glaciers have affected the landscape anywhere, from the rounded peaks to which the glaciers have gone. just above and smooth the top, even most waterways are actually FS where glaciers have carved them out, just as a river forms White Water, a glacier will splinter as it hugs a bend in the valley or crack when fall down steeper slopes.

The result is some of the most dramatic and imposing terrain on Earth. The analogy with a waterfall on a glacier is an ice fall, so if you go over a steep slope, the ice will break up and move very fast, so the change in speed will occur. the largest is where cracks will form that reach up to 100 feet into the frozen heart of the glacier. Cracks are cracks in the fragile surface of ice. The ice near the surface is worn away and appears a whiter gray color, while the newly exposed ice at the bottom of the crassus is a deep blue, it is a world that is always in motion and always demands respect, always you have to think about the future, thinking about what's underneath you, if you walk on the snow you might have faces underneath you, they're always changing.

We're always doing something interesting like the Rivers glaciers are joined by other glaciers as they travel downhill, so down here we have the south arm of the Men Andal glacier and you can see where the rock is being pulled away and if Think about the glaciers like rivers When two of these rivers join together, the rock that was on their side will be pushed out between them and that is what is called Medial Marine. The rocks that used to be on the side of each branch are now in the middle of the main arm, so if you count the medial marines on a glacier you can tell how many upstream tributaries join to form that main arm, just as the glacier transforms the landscape, is also becoming one of the main forces of Change is water.

Glaciers have their own plumbing system that helps carry water from both rain and melt that occurs on the surface of the glacier away from the glacier. It usually starts melting seeping through the snow if it's there and then it will start. flowing through the ice if there are any type of fractures or cracks in the ice, those caps will direct the water as it forms. Rivers, we call them super glacial streams, so at some point the water will reach the bed of the glacier and that feature is It's called Mulan, which is a French word for mill and molans tend to form where there is a weakness, some kind of crack in the ice, which is a place where water can sometimes reach the glacier bed, hundreds of kilometers. meters through the glacier ice, but to truly understand the devastating power of a glacier you have to see its oldest ice up close.

Mike and Dawn just found the perfect place to do it. A glacial ice cave, but it is unstable, it was formed from moving ICE that could move at any moment, what do you think, Mike? I don't know, I don't like seeing this crack right here in 2013, a glacial ice cave collapsed in Oregon, killing a 25-year-old snowboarder, the ice is moving, the ice is melting. I can see that it's already broken there and there's a lot of light coming through that thin ice. Alaska is a land formed by impressive forces. Giant earthquakes. Imposing volcanoes and glaciers that would cover Manhattan three times over.

These huge ice SLs have the power to crush. mountains to dust to understand how you have to venture where most dare not, enter the frozen heart of the glacier, a potentially deadly ice cave. Wow, you can see these cracks where it's very thin right there for this whole section to fall through. a dynamic environment that you are visiting and there is always the possibility of something going wrong. I think we should enter from this side, yes, that looks better. Cool glaciologist Mike Heckers and mountain guide Dawn Riley carefully pass through the unstable entrance into an otherworldly Wonder Cavern, look at this ceiling sauce, it's probably what there is 20 feet of ice above us, maybe rising Above their heads, enough ice to fill 10 Olympic swimming pools, if the glacier moves, everything could collapse.

I mean, it's amazing, these features, you can see some of These bubbles and cracks see a big rock up there. This is truly one of the most amazing features here on the Men Andol Glacier. This ice cave can be seen by the colors and shapes that can be seen on the walls. It is truly magnificent within this ice. The secret to how glaciers have such a giant geological impact: Its clarity means it is super dense, three times heavier than the snow that created it, making the glacier look like a billion-ton steamroller on earth. This is really cool, so soft you can see how gentle it is. of flowing over these rocks, yeah, I can't find a glass sculpture that pretty and they are natural ice caves that are temporary, some collapse after a few days, some after a few years, at any given time there can be dozens of them in Alaska , although most will also be. remote or dangerous to enter its dynamic natural wonders created by water and wind, this ice cave is formed by the heat of this stream right here and the wind that blows through here basically melts and sculpts the walls as the heat flows through this cave is unusually large. because it is drawing air not from one inlet but from two.

Oh, look at this, I think I even see blue sky up there. This well was first cut by water drilling from the surface of the glacier, a feature called mulam, over time it has widened by warm air. Like the cave, there is a nice cross ventilation blowing in here. The warm air from the forest enters directly through here. The constant melting creates one of the most striking features of this cave. You can see the ice sculptured on the side. It is caused by differential melting. by air currents blowing through here and water dripping down in some places and not in others where it drips, it's going to melt more, so you get these really fascinating shapes, oh yeah, you can see water coming down this edge. , so you say that's what it kind of carves, sculpts, the water runs, this melts a little bit differentially with the water flowing down these edges, it kind of eats it up and then it starts somewhere else.

Glacial ice absorbs all colors of the visible light spectrum, except blue, which it transmits brilliantly. Hue, the further light travels through the ice, the bluer the ice appears, but in this disaster zone nothing stays the same for long. The ice cave here is always changing, so more ice will collapse near the entrance, probably this summer and over the next year or so. and in a couple of years this ice cave probably won't be here beneath an ancient glacier in Alaska an ice cave welcomes visitors from another world. The good thing about quadcopters is that we can get to places that are really dangerous by fitting into extremely small spaces. placesIn kasses and glaciers you can take photographs that no one has seen before to better understand this last frontier Christopher Carson and Lion Elaton are ushering in a new era of exploration.

They are searching for an undocumented ice cave, a place that human eyes have never seen before. Look, there's that one down there, maybe we walked along the ice right next to the glacier and found a new one, oh my gosh, oh man, look at that, it's amazing, they're not sure how stable it is or how deep Below the glacier, a human descent there could be fatal, so they have requested high-tech help. This is our quadcopter. It is used to record all our aerial shots. It has a mini HD camera and 9-inch blades that keep it going.

In the air it is gyro-stabilized, so no matter where you turn it, it stays in the same area. For the past few months, they have used their quadcopter to reveal views of glaciers that have never been captured before as far as I have researched the first person. who once flew a drone into an ice cave. You know, we haven't found a single person who does that and it's really exciting for Chris, but it's a high risk for this delicate vessel. The challenges are crazy. Absolutely crazy, from wind to rain to turbulence, you know you don't want to crash obviously, but today's cave is an extra challenge: the quadcopter will fly out of sight, so they'll have to rely on the video beam to a monitor from the helicopter camera so we have one person who is actually flying the quadcopter and the other person is monitoring the actual shot and what is happening inside that shot the signal loose in this ice cave and it could be the curtain for your $4,000 quadcopter, so there are a lot of things that can go wrong and you can lose. your drone uh what direction be careful on the right so one of the obvious challenges was the degree to which the ice cave actually descended. turn a little to the left, okay, okay, it's about to lose sight of me, although you go down and there's water falling everywhere it's dark and you have to enter at an angle we didn't have visual so we're flying just off the monitor Look at that I think it goes down to maybe like 30 feet more that's incredible they discover a subglacial tunnel that runs deep beneath the crystalline ice the ice cave was absolutely incredible very very deep a blue feeds on it they are capturing views never seen before, perfect and beautiful, now all you need to do is bring the helicopter a little closer to us.

I'm going, I can't see, we're starting to lose the signal, okay, be careful, okay, I'm going to lean in when you lose the signal, you're flying blind, there's nothing else you can do, wait, wait, wait, come back, come back, it's okay. okay, I can't, I can't see, you crashed, ah, that's it, you crashed, that's it, I didn't know if it fell into an abyss somewhere, the quadcopter crashed near the entrance, where the cave is most dangerously unstable. You have to go get it, go get it, I'm not going, you trust that he wanted me to go down there, but he was the one who lost it, so it was only fair that he get it back. all for you I think you've got it I'll get it I'll get it despite the risk Chris isn't ready to abandon his quadcopter Ice caves are really dangerous I mean these things Cal or collapse all the time you've got it You're okay, yeah, Chris , like a true champion, fell and recovered.

His quadcopter is damaged, but his camera still captures some fleeting images. Portraits of a

hidden

world, probably already consumed by change in this volatile land. These things are melting so fast and moving. so quickly that some of these shots we get may never be seen again, so it's pretty humbling to be able to see it, you know, for the first time. Changing, dangerous and unpredictable life in Alaska means facing forces of devastating force, but without them, Alaska would not be. Be the wonder it is, nothing is free. I mean, if you have beautiful volcanoes there is a danger of eruption, when you have these steep mountains there is a danger of landslides despite the disastrous risks or maybe because of them.

The wild beauty of Alaska will always draw us in. Back to this last frontier