Alaska Earthquake of 1964

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

**Josh** (0:11)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know about earthquakes in Alaska in 1964
I'm gonna talk like this for the rest of the podcast. What do you think?

**Chuck** (0:26)
I think that 60% of the people just stopped listening.

**Josh** (0:30)
Well, they are going to be sorry, because this is going to be an interesting episode.

**Chuck** (0:36)
Yeah, this is, you know, I had no idea how earthquake-prone Alaska is, was, and is, until doing this kind of research.

**Josh** (0:46)
Oh, I was raised on that knowledge. My family talked about it a lot.

**Chuck** (0:51)
No comment.

**Josh** (0:52)
In Toledo. Hey, Chuck, I have a question. Will you ask me the first time I was ever in an earthquake or ever felt an earthquake?

**Chuck** (1:01)
When's the first time you ever felt an earthquake?

**Josh** (1:04)
Yesterday.
Chuck, will you ask me a follow-up question? Will you ask what I was reading while I experienced that first earthquake?

**Chuck** (1:13)
Well, where were you and what were you reading?

**Josh** (1:15)
I was reading this article about the Alaska earthquake of 1964, and I was at home.

**Chuck** (1:23)
Wow. I didn't know that you guys felt a tremor.

**Josh** (1:25)
There was one in Cuba, like a 6.8, and I felt it in Central Florida plain as day.

**Chuck** (1:31)
Wow. I've never, I lived in LA for five years, and I never felt a single anything.

**Josh** (1:36)
Yeah. I pretty much assumed I would go the rest of my life without feeling an earthquake, and nope.
Nope. Cuba had other ideas. Yeah.

**Chuck** (1:45)
Well, I mean, after reading about how, like, far away, like, there's some pretty startling stuff in this episode, like, as far as how far away you could feel things and, like, the upset that it caused, like, around the world, it's nuts.

**Josh** (2:01)
Yeah. A lot of people were upset about this, for sure.

**Chuck** (2:04)
All right. Well, we're talking about the Good Friday earthquake of 1964 in Alaska, which at the time was the biggest, well, the second largest ever in the world that they had recorded, at 9.2, just behind the 9.5 that hit Chile in 1960

**Josh** (2:24)
Yeah.

**Chuck** (2:25)
And considering the devastation that happened in Alaska, and probably only because it happened in Alaska, it only killed 131 people, which is a lot. But I think the earthquake itself in Alaska, how many people? It's like 15 people, maybe?

**Josh** (2:43)
Yeah. I think there was actually in the whole state something like-

**Chuck** (2:46)
No, no, no. I'm saying how many people it killed was only-

**Josh** (2:48)
Oh, sorry. I thought you're saying how many people lived in Alaska.

**Chuck** (2:51)
No, just like the literal earthquake of people in Alaska.

**Josh** (2:54)
I think it was like 15 or 16 people. That was it from the actual earthquake. Yeah.

**Chuck** (3:00)
I wonder why you laughed.

**Josh** (3:02)
Yeah, that was why because I thought you're making a joke and I thought it was hilarious.

**Chuck** (3:06)
So let's get to it, eh?

**Josh** (3:08)
Well, there was one other big thing about this earthquake besides just the massiveness. I mean, 9.5, that is awfully close to as high as you can go on the Richter scale, right?

**Chuck** (3:18)
Yeah, 9.2 was this one.

**Josh** (3:19)
9.2, sorry, Chile was the 9.5. Still, nothing to sneeze at, right? Second largest earthquake on record. One of the other reasons that it's important or significant is because it basically opened up the door for seismology and our understanding of earthquakes and tsunamis. And basically, everything we know about those things today kind of kicked off with this 1964 earthquake because we were able to go study it. It happened at just the right time in a sense.

**Chuck** (3:49)
Yeah, for sure. And this was a megathrust earthquake. And as it turns out, the most destructive kind of earthquake that the world knows is the megathrust. Ten out of the ten of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded have been megathrust. And that is where, and we've talked about this in the earthquakes episode as well as other ones, probably the Japanese tsunami one as well.
But this megathrust earthquake is what happens when you have two tectonic plates hitting one another. And in the case of the megathrust, the heavier one slides below the lighter one, and that heavier plate just dives into the mantle. It's, you know, we talked about subduction a lot, but it subduces.