A massive mountain rockslide near Juneau shakes the ground on Christmas Eve

View of the aftermath of a massive rockslide on Christmas Eve about 46 miles northeast of Juneau. (Photo by Daryl Keith Tate via Facebook)

Around Christmas, there were reports of a large mountain earthquake and rockslide in the wilderness near Juneau. But what came first? Earthquake or slip?

Jimmy Tate is a helicopter pilot based in Atlin, British Columbia. The day after Christmas, he and his family were flying along the Taco River Canyon after checking a cabin in the area.

“It’s interesting because I’ve probably run into that river for the better part of 35 years,” said Tait. “I noticed it immediately before the rest of my family did and it is very important.”

One of the mountains along the river about 46 miles northeast of Juneau looked as if part of his face had been sliced ​​off.

“The area in the valley was full of debris and mud that was pushed out when the foot of the mountain collapsed,” said Tate.

Sonya Nagorsky, assistant professor of geology at Southeastern University of Alaska, says some of the mountain slopes in that area are over 50 degrees. In other words, the slopes are so steep that they almost resemble a cliff face.

“And so, he just collapses and fails,” Nagorsky said. “It’s so amazing that those rocks sit at such a steep angle at all.”

Nagorsky says there are a lot of volcanic rocks that have been under the earth’s surface. It is not as strong as other rock shapes. It is more susceptible to weather conditions such as rain, snow and ice with lots of freezing and thawing.

“It’s easy to think that our mountains are solid and stable, but the Earth’s surface is constantly changing, especially when there are tectonic shifts and ice changes,” Nagorsky said.

“A lot of the changes can be very surprising,” she said. “Landslide is the primary method of erosion in steep mountains of about 30 to 40 degrees, which are found in abundance here.

Nagorsky says it’s not clear exactly how much of the nearly 4,000-foot mountain crusted and fell away at 10:50 a.m. on Christmas Eve. Its best estimate is 20 million cubic feet of material. That’s enough to fill Houston’s stellar half.

When all that rock fell, that was literally enough to shake the ground. If the shaking was caused by an earthquake, it would be recorded as 2.8 or 2.9 on the Richter scale, says Natalia Robert, a seismologist at the Seismological Center in Alaska.

But Robert is clear. The landslide itself was not caused by any previous earthquake. She knows this because it is very easy for seismologists to distinguish the sudden and sudden onset of an earthquake from the severity of a building’s progressive landslide, sometimes over the course of several minutes.

“It starts out very small, then the amplitude of the signal gradually increases and then gets bigger and bigger as the landslide mass gains momentum and moves down the slope,” said Robert. “And then it turns on as all those rocks reach their final resting place.”

Robert says this wasn’t the first time or even the biggest event. Larger landslides were discovered around southeast Alaska in 2005 and 2008.

“Then in later years, some of them are much larger than this landslide on the Taco River,” she said. “Some of them were so large that they were discovered globally.”

The Taco River is one of the largest salmon producing rivers in southeast Alaska. Since it crosses international borders, both the United States and Canada share the harvest.

David Harris, a biologist with the Commercial Fisheries District Department of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, says the slide may have destroyed any salmon roe at the foot of the mountain. But he believes it will not have a significant effect on your overall salmon intake.

“There are two or three channels that are really big,” Harris said. “In addition, the smaller connection side shrinks and so forth.”

“There is plenty of room for the water to find a way to cross,” he said. “It’s not like a narrow canyon full of materials.”

Harris says that much larger landslides completely prevented taco elsewhere, but the river always finds a way to directly penetrate it. Pilot Jimmy Tate warns Alaskans who have cabins or remodel along the taco to watch out for lots of dead and dead trees to wash off the riverbed in the spring. .

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