Enormous Landslide Hits Glacier Bay in Alaska
Last Tuesday in Alaska, over 100 million tons of rock collapsed from a 4,000 foot high mountainside in Glacier Bay National Park. The debris spread out over six miles onto glacier below and produced a huge cloud of dust.
"It rivals anything we've had in several years," Colin Stark, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory told Alaska Dispatch News.
Stark added that the amount of rock that fell is comparable to 60 million SUVs falling down a mountainside. "That's a lot of SUVs," says Stark "It's huge."
Stark says that mountains in the area are particularly fragile because of of shifting tectonic plates. "Mountains are being built very fast and they're also being destroyed very fast because the rocks are weak and glacial erosion is very powerful," Stark said on the Alaskan radio station KHNS.
Stark will head to Juneau this week to collect samples and study the causes of the landslide more deeply.
No humans were near the collapse, but if a cruise ship had been nearby, the results may have been dire. Other similar landslides have created tsunami-like waves after rocks crashed onto a glacier.
