During the magnitude 8.2 earthquake that rocked Southwest Alaska, Kodiak was host to an unexpected visitor- a historian seeking to chronicle the history of recent earthquakes in the North Pacific.
“My name is Spencer Abbe. I’m a doctoral student at the University of Oregon in the Department of History. And then researching the history of human interaction with earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions in the North Pacific, from the early 18th century, up to the mid and late 20th century- been working on this project for a little over a year. And I happened to have been, by coincidence, researching in Kodiak for the last three or four days or so just before this most recent tsunami warning took place just by pure accident,” Abbe said.
Sometimes people are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or maybe for Abbe, Kodiak was the right place at the right time for someone who studies humans’ relationship to earthquakes. Abbe has been studying some of the most impressive earthquakes that have occurred since the earliest days of Russian settlement in Alaska. In Kodiak, he’s come to visit the archive of the Kodiak History Museum to learn about some of Kodiak’s more notorious earthquakes- especially the disastrous Good Friday earthquake of 1964. The area first piqued his interest years ago.
“I was actually here for a conference for the Alaska Historical Society a couple of years ago, and I’d had it on my list of places to come back to- part of what intrigued me was, there are a couple of monuments around town, there’s one right outside the fire station in one right outside the Kodiak History Museum that mark the high points of the tidal wave in 1964. And it occurred to me that there are a lot of similar monuments to that over in Japan on the East Coast, some of which that go back hundreds of years marking pretty much the same thing. They say ‘there was a tsunami here, yeah, this time period.’ The interesting thing about the ones that are in Japan is that they generally say something ‘like whatever you do, don’t build below this line.’ And of course, everybody has since then,” Abbe said.
Abbe’s research isn’t focused on this time period, but he says that the earthquake certainly was comparable in size to some of the other ones he’s studying.
“There was the Good Friday quake, which was a 9.2. And then in 1965 out of the Rat Island, at the far end of the Aleutian chain, there was an 8.3 in 1965. And I think that was the last biggest one before the one that we had last night, which I think was an 8.2. Now, I’m not a seismologist- most of what I do is looking at how human beings have experienced these quakes, how they remember them, and how we build our societies to accommodate them or build around them or that sort of thing. So you may want to check that with a seismologist. But all the records I’ve been reading over the last couple days that it would be the biggest since 1965, as far as I know,” Abbe said.
Fortunately, the earthquake did not result in a large tsunami or significant damage. Undoubtedly a new chapter has been penned in earthquake history in Alaska, but one that sees its protagonists emerging relatively unscathed, if a bit rattled.