Shutterstockīut our focus was on how warming oceans boost wave power. This column first appeared in 2002.Since at least the 1980s, wave power has increased worldwide as more heat is pumped into the ocean. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute. This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. He estimated the odds of a giant wave occurring in Lituya Bay on any given day as 9,000-to-1. Despite the bay’s violent history, Miller didn’t discourage people from visiting there. Miller dated the trim lines on the hills and confirmed witnesses accounts of a several giant waves in 1936, and also found evidence of similar waves in the 1850s and 1874. The July earthquake in 1958 was not the first time a giant wave had raced through Lituya Bay. The captain and his wife survived the trip outside the bay, though their boat did not. The captain recalled riding the wave “like a surfboard” and looking down on trees of the spit as the wave carried him 80 feet above. Moving about 100 miles per hour, the giant wave carried the third boat over La Chaussee Spit and into the open ocean. A second boat in mid-bay survived the wave by riding over its crest. The wave sunk one boat near the entrance to the bay, killing a husband and wife. Geological Survey publication, The Giant Waves of Lituya Bay. He described their experiences in the U.S. Miller later interviewed the captains of two of three trolling boats anchored in Lituya Bay at the time of the earthquake. The late geologist Don Miller flew over Lituya Bay 12 hours after the earthquake.
The waves sheared and stripped the bark from thousands of trees, some of them four feet in diameter. The rock mass displaced a large body of water, causing both the splash wave that rose to 1,740 feet and a gravity wave that was 150 feet high at the head of the bay.
The 1958 earthquake shook loose millions of cubic yards of dirt and rocks from a 40-degree slope in the northeast corner of the bay. The inland part of the bay lies dead on the Fairweather fault, a weak section of Earth’s crust, which, like the San Andreas fault, causes earthquakes when it fails and slips from side to side. The shallow entrance to the bay was the most predictable hazard at Lituya Bay, but the absence of Native villages within the bay and distinct lines on hillsides that separated old trees from newer growth hinted at the other. After a futile search for bodies, La Perouse named the only island within the bay Cenotaph, meaning “empty tomb.” The current at the bay entrance reaches about 14 miles per hour, twice as fast as the Yukon River at Eagle. The extreme tidal current at the narrow mouth of the bay killed 21 of his men as they explored in small boats. La Perouse soon witnessed the dark side of this beautiful place. La Perouse so that he named it “Port of France” in 1798. The bay, carved by a glacier and nestled within the snow-covered Fairweather Range, impressed French explorer J. Seven miles long, two miles wide, and shaped like a T, Lituya Bay is the only refuge for boats along a 100-mile stretch of the Southeast coast.
“The bay was filled with icebergs and trees, and there was a tongue of trees and ice going out to sea outside the bay.” “When I got there, it was a truly amazing sight,” Davis said. Neil Davis, a Fairbanks author, geophysicist, and emeritus professor at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, flew over Lituya Bay in a Super Cub two days after the earthquake.
The slide also triggered a wave more than 100 feet high that raced down the bay. The wave that followed reached 1,740 feet above sea level on a hill opposite the slide. In 1958, a magnitude 8.3 earthquake triggered a tremendous landslide into the ocean. Lituya Bay, on the Pacific coast about 100 miles southeast of Yakutat and 40 miles west of Glacier Bay, is the site of the largest splash wave ever recorded. One of the prettiest places in Southeast Alaska has felt some of nature’s most violent behavior.
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