North Yakutat earthquake shakes southeast Alaska

A 7.0 magnitude earthquake Saturday morning triggered a series of aftershocks that shook communities across southeast Alaska and the Yukon.

Dozens of people from Valdez to Whitehorse to Southeast Alaska reported to the USGS that they felt the quake, which occurred around 11:40 a.m., according to data from the Alaska Earthquake Center.

The epicenter was first measured in an area about 55 miles north of Yakutat. Emergency personnel did not hear any reports of damage or injuries.

“It's a good shaker, it's long and it's definitely rolling,” Yakutat Fire Department Chief Casey Mapes said. “My daughter in Anchorage said she felt it.”

When an earthquake like this happens, Battalion Chief Max Mielke said they are very concerned about the possibility of a landslide somewhere in Yakutat Bay or nearby Russell Strait.

Earthquake Center Director Mike West said he expressed the same concern to state emergency operations personnel when they called him Saturday afternoon.

“Magnitude 7 is large enough to destabilize landslides historically,” he said. But he did not hear any reports of landslides.

Yakutat's unique geography

West said he expects this combination of earthquakes and aftershocks to generate a lot of interest from scientists because the area is so geologically complex.

“It's a geological train wreck,” he said.

The area includes the Yakutat Microplate, which lies at what the West calls Alaska's “corner,” where the Pacific and North American tectonic plates meet.

On the side of the Pacific Plate, West said one could think of the Aleutian Islands.

“In the Aleutian Islands, you have these big earthquakes, but the process is really well understood. It's a subduction zone,” he said.

This is the area where tectonic plates collide and sink under each other.

“Certainly, we can split hairs about exactly what the behavior is, but we understand what a subduction zone is,” he said.

On the side of the Pacific plate, one can look to southeast Alaska, near Sitka, where a massive strike-slip fault system runs along the coast. This is a type of fault where plates slide past each other.

“It's like our northern version of the San Andreas Fault,” West said, referring to one of the world's most famous faults located in California where a 1906 San Francisco earthquake killed at least 3,000 people.

“The Yakutat area is the intersection of these two-thousand-mile-scale geological processes, and frankly, that whole area around Yakutat and Prince William Sound is kind of a geologic train wreck,” West said.

In the coming days, scientists will try to determine which fault the earthquake centered

Although it would be a mistake to assume this would happen in one small place, West said.

“A 7-magnitude earthquake — this thing must be several miles long,” he said. “This is not a dot on the map.”

Area residents posted on social media that they felt a rolling or swaying movement. This is generally a good indicator of the size of the earthquake, West said.

“Those rolling waves are a sign of a major earthquake,” he said. “Those big rolling waves don't happen in our normal 5 magnitude phase [earthquakes] “Where you feel a little burst, then it's kind of over,” he said. “Roughly speaking, a magnitude 5 earthquake — the actual rupture itself is over in a few seconds. At a magnitude 7, we're talking about something that probably took dozens of seconds to actually complete.”

The earthquake center calls it the Hubbard Icequake, and reports that more than 20 aftershocks of magnitude 3 or higher followed the initial mainshock, with the largest ranging in magnitude from 4 to 5.1.

This is a breaking news story that will be updated

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