Browsing by Author "Haeussler, Peter J."
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- The 2015 landslide and tsunami in Taan Fiord, AlaskaHigman, Bretwood; Shugar, Dan H.; Stark, Colin P.; Ekstrom, Goran; Koppes, Michele N.; Lynett, Patrick; Dufresne, Anja; Haeussler, Peter J.; Geertsema, Marten; Gulick, Sean; Mattox, Andrew; Venditti, Jeremy G.; Walton, Maureen A. L.; McCall, Naoma; Mckittrick, Erin; MacInnes, Breanyn; Bilderback, Eric L.; Tang, Hui; Willis, Michael J.; Richmond, Bruce; Reece, Robert S.; Larsen, Chris; Olson, Bjorn; Capra, James; Ayca, Aykut; Bloom, Colin; Williams, Haley; Bonno, Doug; Weiss, Robert; Keen, Adam; Skanavis, Vassilios; Loso, Michael (Springer Nature, 2018-09-06)Glacial retreat in recent decades has exposed unstable slopes and allowed deep water to extend beneath some of those slopes. Slope failure at the terminus of Tyndall Glacier on 17 October 2015 sent 180 million tons of rock into Taan Fiord, Alaska. The resulting tsunami reached elevations as high as 193 m, one of the highest tsunami runups ever documented worldwide. Precursory deformation began decades before failure, and the event left a distinct sedimentary record, showing that geologic evidence can help understand past occurrences of similar events, and might provide forewarning. The event was detected within hours through automated seismological techniques, which also estimated the mass and direction of the slide - all of which were later confirmed by remote sensing. Our field observations provide a benchmark for modeling landslide and tsunami hazards. Inverse and forward modeling can provide the framework of a detailed understanding of the geologic and hazards implications of similar events. Our results call attention to an indirect effect of climate change that is increasing the frequency and magnitude of natural hazards near glaciated mountains.
- Repeated Coseismic Uplift of Coastal Lagoons Above the Patton Bay Splay Fault System, Montague Island, Alaska, USADePaolis, Jessica M.; Dura, Tina; Witter, Robert C.; Haeussler, Peter J.; Bender, Adrian; Curran, Janet H.; Corbett, D. Reide (American Geophysical Union, 2024-05)Coseismic slip on the Patton Bay splay fault system during the 1964 Mw 9.2 Great Alaska Earthquake contributed to local tsunami generation and vertically uplifted shorelines as much as 11 m on Montague Island in Prince William Sound (PWS). Sudden uplift of 3.7–4.3 m caused coastal lagoons along the island's northwestern coast to gradually drain. The resulting change in depositional environment from marine lagoon to freshwater muskeg created a sharp, laterally continuous stratigraphic contact between silt and overlying peat. Here, we characterize the geomorphology, sedimentology, and diatom ecology across the 1964 earthquake contact and three similar prehistoric contacts within the stratigraphy of the Hidden Lagoons locality.We find that the contacts signal instances of abrupt coastal uplift that, within error, overlap the timing of independently constrained megathrust earthquakes in PWS—1964 Common Era, 760–870 yr BP, 2500–2700 yr BP, and 4120– 4500 yr BP. Changes in fossil diatom assemblages across the inferred prehistoric earthquake contacts reflect ecological shifts consistent with repeated draining of a lagoon system caused by >3 m of coseismic uplift. Our observations provide evidence for four instances of combined megathrust‐splay fault ruptures that have occurred in the past ∼4,200 years in PWS. The possibility that 1964‐style combined megathrust‐splay fault ruptures may have repeated in the past warrants their consideration in future seismic and tsunami hazards assessments.