Joint effort assesses landslide and tsunami risks in Alaska’s Prince William Sound
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The [Woodwell Climate Research] Center has gathered several Alaska experts into a program called the Tsunamigenic SLope Instabilities Partnership, or Arctic T-SLIP, to help address the risks of tsunami-generated landslides amid Alaska's melting glaciers and thawing permafrost,
"Hazards from landslides and landslide-generated tsunamis are increasing. Among all the natural hazards in Alaska, this hazard is the least quantified and integrated into local, state, and federal hazard management practices," the Arctic T-SLIP website says.
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In Alaska, where there are thousands of mountains and tens of thousands of glaciers that are unmonitored and have not even been named, and vast distances and remoteness pose daunting challenges. Scientists, agencies and communities have thus winnowed down their monitoring to the highest priority sites.
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The discoveries at Barry Arm mobilized what is now a state-of-the-art, federally funded monitoring program that has made the site one of the most instrumented mountain slopes in Alaska.
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The "backbone" is a set of tidal gauges installed by the National Weather Service's National Tsunami Warning Center, Staley said.
Other equipment includes Alaska Earthquake Center seismic stations, which now serve the dual purposes of detecting earthquakes and detecting landslides. There is a ground-based radar system on the opposite side of the fjord to measure downslope movement. There are weather-tracking devices. There are infrasound devices that capture the sounds of rockfalls and other events. There are remote cameras to capture images over time. And new this year, Staley said, is an array of seismic devices at the top of the landslide area.
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