landslide Archives | Restoring Liberty

A massive landslide, estimated to be around six-and-half miles long, near Glacier Bay has scientists in New York clambering to get to Southeast. The slide happened Tuesday morning, and was discovered by a local pilot.

On Tuesday morning, when Paul Swanstrom saw the dust cloud hovering over the Lamplugh Glacier, he said he knew what it was immediately . . .

This landslide in Glacier Bay National Park, like the ones in 2014 and 2012, sent millions of tons of debris spilling down the mountainside. According to the Alaska Earthquake Center it happened at 8:21 a.m. Swanstrom flew over it about two hours later. (Read more from “Monster Landslide Rocks Southeast Alaska” HERE)

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Even by Alaska standards, the rock slide in Glacier Bay National Park was a huge event.

It was a monumental geophysical event that was almost overlooked until a pilot happened to fly over where the cliff collapsed and snapped some photographs nearly a month later.

When the cliff collapsed in the national park in southeast Alaska on June 11, it sent rock and ice coursing down a valley and over a lovely white glacier in what perhaps was the largest landslide recorded in North America.

The rumbling was enough so that it showed up as a 3.4-magnitude earthquake in Alaska. The seismic event also was recorded in Canada. The massive landslide occurred in a remote valley beneath the 11,750-foot Lituya Mountain in the Fairweather Range about six miles from the border with British Columbia.

“I don’t know of any that are bigger,” Marten Geertsema, a research geomorphologist for the provincial Forest Service in British Columbia, said Thursday, when comparing the landslide to others in North America.

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Monster Landslide Rocks Southeast Alaska

Wednesday’s Alaska landslide possibly the biggest in North American recorded history