A vastness close to the North Pole
Alaska is a sort of peninsula west of Canada, with which it shares a border for nearly 2,500 km. The rest of the borders are formed by very jagged coasts. They are bathed by the Bering Sea, the Chukchi Sea and the Arctic and Pacific Oceans. This coastline, about 50,000 km long, juxtaposes contrasting landscapes: from beaches in the north, to majestic cliffs and fjords in the south. Like the Lynn Canal which, at 150 km, is the longest fjord in North America. Almost the entire state (except for the last Aleutian Islands and the southernmost part of the panhandle) is located beyond 56° North. A quarter of the territory is even beyond the Arctic Circle. In these hostile latitudes, the population density is tiny: imagine the population of Montpellier spread over three times the size of France! This American state has 739,795 inhabitants, including 401,499 in the city of Anchorage alone. To live in Alaska, you must not fear nature, solitude or polar temperatures. The administrative capital since 1905 is Juneau, with only 32,700 inhabitants, even if Anchorage has become the economic capital.
Spectacular mountain ranges
Alaska has important mountain ranges that partition the country and condition its climate. The Arctic Brooks Range is 1,000 km long and about 240 km wide. It is a succession of plateaus and small mountains, whose average elevation is about 1 500 m. The coastal chain, closer to the Pacific in the southeast of Alaska, is 1,900 km long and culminates with Mount St. Elias at 5,500 meters. It begins with the Chugach Mountains at the foot of Anchorage and continues with the Wrangell Range - nothing to do with the city - further north. Most of the peaks exceed 4,000 m, such as Mount Blackburn (4,996 m) or Mount Marcus Baker (4,016 m). From the top of its 6190 meters of altitude, Mount Denali dominates the Alaska Range which stretches over 900 km long. It is without any measure with its neighbors.
Mount Denali, the summit
Denali is an Athabascan word meaning "the highest". In 1896, a gold digger first saw this peak and named it McKinley in honor of the Republican presidential candidate. Since then, the state and a number of individuals and institutions, including the Alaska Geographical Society, have sought to restore the original name to Alaska's most famous mountain. But the federal institutions refused in 1975, then in 2007, preferring to differentiate the name of the mountain from that of the park where it is located. In 2015, Barack Obama succeeded in giving back its name to the mountain, out of respect for the indigenous populations. Its ascent is particularly difficult. The mountain presents the highest mountain face in the world with a difference in altitude of 4 330 m! During furious storms, the winds sometimes exceed 200 km/h. In fact, Mount Denali hides two peaks, the North Peak and the South Peak, the latter being the highest. The first ascent of the North Peak was in 1910 when Charles Mc Gonagall, Peter Anderson and Bill Taylor, three gold seekers who knew nothing about mountaineering, made it to the top. When they told their story, nobody wanted to believe them. Fortunately, they had the good idea to take with them a stake that they had planted on the summit. The ice axe found on the summit in 1913 by Hudson Stuck, Harry Karstens, Walter Harper and Robert Tatum, climbers who reached the South Peak at that time. Today, about 1,000 climbers attempt to reach the summit each year. Half of them usually succeed, but many have lost their lives.
Volcanoes on the Pacific Ring of Fire
According to Alfred Lothar Wegener's theory of continental drift, the Pacific tectonic plate is sliding northwestward under the North American plate. These movements cause Alaska to experience a significant number of earthquakes and ongoing volcanic activity. Thus, the 49th state of the United States is considered to be one of the most active seismic zones in the world, in the middle of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Especially in the Aleutian Islands chain, which has 41 active volcanoes! Several faults like the San Andreas fault in California are present in Alaska, including one in Denali. Thus this state records an average of a thousand earthquakes per year, but almost all of them have a magnitude of less than 3.5 on the Richter scale.
Devastating earthquakes and tsunamis
Between 1899 and 1996, 75 earthquakes had a magnitude between 7 and 8 and 10 were greater than 8. The terrible eruption of Mount Katmaï in 1912 lasted 60 hours, throwing 30 km3 of rocks, ashes and pumice. For three days, a rain of ashes fell on 100 000 km2. The city of Kodiak, located 100 km away, was plunged into darkness and covered by a 30 cm layer of ash. A new volcano has just emerged: it is called Novarupta. Mount Katmaï lost 200 m of altitude but gained a very beautiful lake with crystalline waters in its center. In July 1958, south of the island of Khantaak, in the bay of Yakutat, an earthquake of a magnitude of 7.9 causes a landslide into the sea: 40 millionm3 of earth fall into the sea and raise a spray of water more than 500 m high. It passed over the mountains and caused a tidal wave whose main wave was 30 m high and moved at 180 km/h in Lituya Bay! In March 1964, the most infamous earthquake in Alaska's history reached a magnitude of 9.2 on the Richter scale and lasted 4 minutes. The energy developed by this phenomenon is 10 million times stronger than the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, 80 times greater than in San Francisco in 1906. In 22 hours, the wave reached the Japanese coasts, although distant from 13 500 km, that is to say an average speed of 600 km/h!
Glaciers in the south of the country
Alaska has no less than 100,000 glaciers covering about 75,000 km2 of land. Most of them are located in the south of the country because the snowfall is much higher there than in the north. Some of them are located in the middle of mountain ranges, others flow into the sea. They owe their blue color to a small 2 cm long worm that lives in the ice by feeding on microscopic algae. The Alaskans joke by attributing this extraordinary color to the reflection of the blue eyes of these small worms. The scientific explanation does not lack poetry. In fact, a glacier - or an iceberg - absorbs all the colors of the spectrum except the blue which spreads on it and colors it.
Appeared in the quaternary period during the so-called periods of glaciation, it is always the same glaciers that remain today. Indeed, at that time, Alaska was not covered with ice, like France; the glaciers are therefore in the same place. This is the most common thesis because moraine forms are not found anywhere else than where they are today. Glaciers are so important and numerous here that they have given their name to a type of formation originating from high mountains and spreading out on the plain, the Alaskan type glacier; such as the Malaspina glacier and its 2,200 km2. The largest glacier in Alaska is the Bering glacier, 160 km long and covering 5 850 km2.
But the most impressive is undoubtedly the group of glaciers forming Glacier Bay, on the jagged coastline bordering Juneau. In a 100 km long fjord, there are a dozen spectacular glaciers pouring their icebergs into the fjord. This area was discovered in 1794 by George Vancouver, but at that time the bay did not exist: it was only a huge ice field, probably the largest in the world. Due to global warming, the sea has gradually taken ground. This extraordinary place was first studied by John Muir in 1879. Traveling through the bay by cruise ship, or even better by sea kayak, will leave you with unforgettable memories. But be careful, when icebergs break off a glacier, they cause a powerful wave that could turn more than one! It is imperative to keep a safe distance. There are other sites where you can observe glaciers flowing into the sea, notably the magnificent Kenai Fjords, from the towns of Seward (Ressurection Bay) and all around Prince William Sound, which you can explore by boat from Whittier and Valdez.
