A year ago, the most impactful earthquake to hit Alaska in half a century damaged buildings and roads in Southcentral, scared a lot of people, changed water levels and stream flow and even caused underground soil liquefaction that resulted in “sand boils” at the surface.
Scientists analyzing all of that and more have been publishing research papers about the magnitude 7.1 Anchorage earthquake, including a multidisciplinary study by more than a dozen authors that’s in the journal Seismological Research Letters.
Geologist Peter Haeussler with the U.S. Geological Survey is one of the dozen or so authors.
He said those types of “intra-slab” earthquakes tend to leave fewer clues at the surface and therefore researchers have to use unique methods for figuring out how often they occur and how big they can be.
“By looking at sediment cores from lake bottoms, you can actually figure out how far back in time you’re actually looking,” Haeussler said. “There are some sort of strange looking sediments that’re thicker and they have physically distinctive features, called turbidites, and there’s strong evidence that turbites were triggered in strong ground shaking in ancient earthquakes in the past.”
Turbidites found in Eklutna Lake, north of Anchorage, after the Nov. 30, 2018 earthquake gave researchers another example of a known earthquake, helping to calibrate measurements on how often the quakes occur.
Haeussler spoke to Alaska Public Media’s Casey Grove.
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Casey Grove is host of Alaska News Nightly, a general assignment reporter and an editor at Alaska Public Media. Reach him atcgrove@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Caseyhere.
