By: Taylor Bonner #7

The Great Alaskan Earthquake happen in Prince William Sound, a region in Alaska.

The Great Alaskan Earthquake happened in 1964 at 5:36p.m . It lasted about 4 min.

131 people were killed during the earthquake,

many from the tsunami that followed

the earthquake.

Calculated travel time map for the tectonic tsunami produced by the 1964 Prince William Sound earthquake in Alaska.

Red: 1- to 4-hour arrival times•Yellow: 5- to 6-hour arrival times•Green: 7- to 14-hour arrival times•Blue: 15- to 21-hour arrival time

A tsunami, is a very large ,destructive

wave caused by an underwater earthquake.

The area where there was a significant damage covered about 130,000 square kilometers. The damage totaled 300-400 million dollars.(1964

dollars)The Great Alaskan earthquake is the 2nd largest

earthquake recorded in world history.

In this March 1964 photo released by the U.S. Geological Survey, tsunami damage is shown

along the waterfront in Kodiak, Alaska.

The benefits resulting from the Great Alaskan Earthquake include the following:

Stronger building codes for buildings

New homes’ foundation have rebars instead of concrete blocks

People have emergency plans and emergency survival kits

The Alaskan Earthquake measures 9.2 on a Richter scale. When a Richter scale is over

8.0 it is meanless. Four out of five earthquakes in the United States occurred

in Alaska.

Plate Tectonics

Before the 1964 earthquake ,geologist were unsure how the earth works. The 1964

earthquake was the first time people understood that there were places called subduction zones

caused by an oceanic plates sinking under a continental plate, that produces earthquakes.Plate tectonics explains everything from why earthquakes happen to how mountains grew.

In this March 1964 photo released by the U.S. Geological Survey, the Government Hill

Elementary School is shown destroyed by a landslide following an earthquake in

Anchorage, Alaska.

The Earthquake occurred in between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate.

In this March 27, 1964 photo released by the U.S. Geological Survey, a man looks over fissures following an earthquake in

the Seward Highway at the head of Turnagain Arm near Anchorage, Alaska.

There were hundreds of aftershocks in the first weeks following the main shock. In the first day alone, eleven major aftershocks were recorded

with a magnitude greater than 6.0. In all, thousands of aftershocks occurred in the months following the quake, and smaller

aftershocks continued to strike the region for more than a year.[