ANCHORAGE — It’s a natural landscape unlike I’ve ever—and I suspect you’ve ever—encountered. Large and angular chunks of land pushed up in a confusing manner, with birch and spruce trees and other vegetation growing up and out of the ground fractures.

It’s a bright and warm mid-April evening and there’s still some snow on the ground, but not too much to prevent me from exploring an unusual municipal park. Pools of water, some iced over, make navigating the fractured land challenging.

If you didn’t know you were in a place called Earthquake Park, you might not necessarily realize you’re in a landscape that was radically and suddenly reshaped in the span of five minutes during a massive disaster more than 50 years ago.

During the magnitude 9.2 Good Friday Earthquake on March 27, 1964, the largest seismic event ever recorded in North America, part of Anchorage’s Turnagain Heights neighborhood was destroyed when a bluff deteriorated and slid toward Cook Inlet, a few miles from downtown.The land here dropped as much as 40 feet and slid as far as 2,000 feet away from its original location.

For being so large, that megaquake and tsunami only killed 139 people thanks to Alaska’s low population density. But it shows just how ferocious and destructive the forces of nature can be.  

Following the 1964 disaster, the municipality left the land that would become Earthquake Park as is to be reclaimed by nature. An interpretive side trail, with detailed signs explaining how and why the ground failed, allows you to better appreciate the reality that the ground we stand on is not always stable.

It also serves as a reminder that disasters big and small can strike without warning and that state and local governments, working with federal partners and community stakeholders, have to be ready to respond.

— Michael Grass

ANCHORAGE — While Anchorage and the rest of southern Alaska would recover from the 1964 Good Friday earthquake, it won’t necessarily take a disaster of the same size and scope to cause major hardship again.

“We are one small earthquake away from a major disaster,” according to Mayor Ethan Berkowitz, in this video produced by Cities of Service, a Bloomberg Philanthropies program which has been working on resiliency issues in Alaska’s most populous municipality, specifically food security. Anchorage is one of 10 cities participating in the Resilience AmeriCorps program.

About 90 percent of Alaska’s goods come into the state through the Port of Anchorage, which relies on an aging and corroding pier that sits atop pilings that are now 30 percent of their original wall thickness. There’s a modernization effort underway. But Anchorage and most of the state will have to rely on Band-Aid repairs until a replacement pier is fully funded and built.

“We’re incredibly dependent on logistics to make sure that we get our food here in Anchorage. We have food supplies on the shelves of three to four days. If there’s a disruption. We have a major problem,” Berkowitz says in the video.

ANCHORAGE — Driving around Alaska's most populous municipal jurisdiction, community gardens and backyard greenhouses are not unusual features to see. They're one way local residents can bolster their food security.

“Alaska Grown” isn’t just a source of local pride, it’s a reminder of the necessity to cultivate local food sources when when you live in an isolated place that regularly experiences major earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, in addition to often cold and bitter winters.

Anchorage’s Mountain View neighborhood, which is home to the most diverse census tract in the nation, has been an area of focus for the municipal government due to its high unemployment and higher percentage of residents who don’t have access to a personal vehicle.

Cross-sector collaborations in Anchorage have focused on community development and resiliency issues in Anchorage

Cities of Service, for instance, has worked with Mountain View Elementary School to build a community greenhouse, a collaboration that’s helped educate children about the importance of cultivating local food sources.

A neighborhood farmers market, which launched last year on a two-acre property along Mountain View Drive controlled by the Anchorage Community Land Trust, has become an area of focus for community development as well.

Anchorage is one four U.S. cities the Daniel Rose Center for Public Leadership is working with this year in its annual fellowship program, along with Grand Rapids, San José and Washington, D.C. Each city is working on its own land-use challenge and in Anchorage, much of the Rose Center’s work is focused on Mountain View and better leveraging the farmers market site as a “community hub and garden” while building better, more walkable connections with neighborhood assets, including a new health clinic, grocery store, boys and girls club, middle school and library.

When building a more resilient community, you often think of strengthening physical infrastructure to withstand natural disasters and disruptions. But as the work to make Mountain View and Anchorage more resilient shows, it also means about strengthening the ability of the community to help sustain itself the next time Alaska’s primary port is knocked offline.

— Michael Grass

If the massive 1964 Good Friday earthquake wasn’t enough to demonstrate the power of disasters in Alaska, you should take a flight between Anchorage and Juneau and hope to have a window seat with a good view and clear weather.

The stunningly beautiful mountains, glaciers, ice fields and fjords along Alaska’s southeastern coast are visually impressive from above. This stretch of territory has been home to the largest tsunamis ever recorded. They’re not just tsunamis—they’re megatsunamis.

In 1958, a large earthquake near Lituya Bay, with a 9.2 magnitude, triggered a rockslide which sent a 40 million cubic yards of rock downward into the narrow inlet, creating a localized wave so high that it removed vegetation up to 1,720 feet in elevation. (For comparison, that’s almost as tall as One World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.)  

The Lituya Bay wave, thanks to the area’s constrained geography and the size of the rockslide, was the tallest tsunami ever recorded on the planet.

On Oct. 17, 2015, a similar type of wave, though not as tall, was created from a landslide in Taan Fjord, an arm of Alaska’s Icy Bay. The wave scraped away forests and vegetation along the inlet’s steep shores up to point that was 600 feet above sea level. But that wave, roughly the same height as the Space Needle in Seattle, initially went unnoticed because the rugged region, part of the Wrangell-St. Elias Wilderness, is mostly uninhabited and the wave dissipated about 8 miles out into open water, stopping a few miles short of the remote Icy Bay Lodge.  

As Atlas Obscura wrote in March, the landslide was detected on the other side of the continent at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, located north of New York City. That remote detection prompted further investigation, which led to the megatsunami’s detection.

“There are not that many landslide detections by us in a given year, maybe just half a dozen,” researcher Göran Ekström told Atlas Obscura. “We now know that when we detect something, it is often spectacular. We had just detected another landslide in the Yukon a week earlier, and had it confirmed, so I was quite excited when I saw another detection in the Saint Elias range, especially since it was not detected by anyone else, and because it was so large.”

There are worries that as climate change warms the planet, the continued melting of glaciers and ice fields, like those in Alaska, will lead to more landslides—and potentially, large localized megatsunamis.

Oftentimes, tsunamis are generated by large offshore earthquakes with epicenters in subduction zones. The distance between those earthquakes and a vulnerable coastline is often large enough where there can be—if such an event is immediately detected—enough time to evacuate people out of harm’s way.

But when localized megatsunamis like those that took place at Icy Bay and Lituya Bay happen, there’s not essentially no time to get out of the way. Facing a rapidly moving wave that is hundreds of feet high—or perhaps even more than 1,000 feet high—is a scenario where emergency managers have essentially have no options to immediately react and respond.

It’s an awesome force of nature—and fortunately a rare one.

— Michael Grass