The adventurous scientist whose feet are on the ground after the great earthquake in Alaska

George Blafker holds a photo of the Alaskan high beaches he took after visiting the south coast in the aftermath of the March 1964 magnitude 9.2 earthquake. Blafker was standing in his office in Menlo Park, Calif., when this photo was taken in 2013 (Photo by Ned Rozelle)

On March 27, 1964, California geologist George Blafker was attending a research conference in Seattle when news came of a major earthquake in Alaska.

“It was about time to quit a meeting when some guys came back from the Space Needle and said they felt a shake,” Blafker said recently in his office in Menlo Park, California. We said, This is a serious earthquake. “

It was, of course, the second-strongest earthquake in the era of instruments capable of measuring it, and one that would change the direction of Blafekker’s career and what people thought about great earthquakes on the Pacific Basin’s Ring of Fire.

Blafker, then 94, was a 35-year-old US Geological Survey researcher who knew a lot about basic geology and cartography, but very little about earthquakes. Then assigned to the “Alaska Department,” he was one of three scientists from the Menlo Park office sent north immediately after the earthquake to see what had happened.

He traveled to Alaska for a one-week trip after the earthquake. During that time he traveled extensively from Prince William Sound to check out the ragged, rising, and sinking landscapes. Realizing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, he and other scientists ended up returning to spend most of the summer of 1964 in Alaska.

On the first trip a few days after the earthquake, two colleagues zeroed in on Anchorage and Alaska’s road system. Blafker captured military helicopters and flew Bush Planes to unoccupied villages and islands in Prince William Sound. He covered much of that country with Jim Osborne, a pilot for Cordova Airlines, who took Blafker to what was left of some villages on the Osborne Post Road.

George Blafker took this photo of Chenega Bay, Alaska, in 1964 after the Great Earthquake. A school survived the earthquake and tsunami that followed. The tsunami destroyed homes less than the school building. (Photo by George Blafekr)

Blafker remembers traveling to Chenega Bay, where 76 people lived before the earthquake. The earthquake wave led to the drowning of 25 of these people.

“Not a single house was livable,” said Blafker, who took a picture of a bare hill with only one building—a school building—visible atop a log hillside. He interviewed a survivor who described a “90-foot wall of water”. Blafker saw with his own eyes that ocean water had entered the school building at about 100 feet above sea level.

The wave caused by the earthquake in Chenega Bay, which Blafekker attributed to a small group of nearby islands concentrating on the rushing waters, was one example of water displaced by the great earthquake. More than 100 people died in Alaska and others as far south as Oregon when tsunamis hit the west coast of the United States and Canada.

Blafker wrote with co-authors Arthur Grantz and Robin Kashadrian for a USGS publication based on their first trip to Alaska.

A few days after the earthquake, Blafker hoped to find clean signs of shredded earth indicating the fault that caused the quake, but the most striking image was the barnacles on ocean rocks. Some were as high as his belt buckle despite the fact that the creatures needed salt water to survive.

“On that first run, we saw those things go up all over the place,” he said.

[March 27, 1964: The day the earth fell to pieces for one Anchorage family]

On subsequent voyages, including when he spent most of the summer scouting from a converted tugboat, the barnacles became more visible signs of the earth raised by the quake. Besides the smell of rotting, high and dry barnacles, mussels and other sea creatures stood out like a white wall.

“The whole of Prince William Sound looked like that,” he said, holding up a photo showing a pale band on the rocks of the shoreline. “You can really see that these creatures know exactly where they need to be. If their height was just a little too high, they would have died.”

Using barnacles as one of his many guides, Plafker made more than 800 measurements that summer of Earth. Elsewhere, forests and bushes fell, and salt water flooded. Blafekker and his colleagues calculated that an area about the size of Washington was lifted into the sky.

In all his travels in Alaska that summer, Blafker didn’t see what he was looking for—a clean line of damage from a fault like California’s San Andreas. That’s because Blafker and his colleagues have been gathering evidence for what author Jerry Thompson describes in the Cascadia Rift as “the exciting idea that a slab of the bottom of the Pacific Ocean might slide under Alaska.”

Blafekker’s work helped establish the existence of the subduction zone that causes many earthquakes off the coast of Alaska and elsewhere on the Pacific Ring of Fire. He may have been the only scientist to have walked the earth in Alaska in 1964, in Indonesia after the tsunami 40 years later, and in Japan in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in 2011. He still marvels that the Great Alaskan earthquake took so few lives for 50 years. years ago.

He said, “It’s a miracle.” An earthquake of exactly the same magnitude killed 225,000 people in Sumatra.

[Here’s who to thank that we all survived Alaska’s November 2018 earthquake]

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