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It was a very early morning in August when an entire mountainside in Alaska's Tracy Arm fjord detached and slid into the deep ocean water beneath it.
The slide created a gargantuan splash – a hyper-local, but massive tsunami that ran up the opposite mountain slope, leveling everything in its path as high as the Empire State Building. It ripped evergreens out of the ground, stripped a nearby island to bare rock and pulverized the glacial ice around it. The whole episode lasted minutes.
About 15 miles away, a National Geographic cruise ship carrying around 150 passengers and crew started to move backward, pulled by suddenly shifting currents through an eerie fog. And twenty miles across the fjord's channel, three sea kayakers camping on high ground woke up to ocean water dripping into their tent, their gear strewn across the shore. One kayak was lost, swirling around in an ocean whirlpool.
It would take days for the scale of the split-second devastation to become clear, but experts say it was miraculous that no one was hurt or killed.
Many scientists believe this phenomenon is being spurred in part by rapidly melting glaciers exposing the mountainside. Without thick sheets of ice to buttress it, the rock face becomes destabilized. Alaska has warmed 4.5 degrees since 1950, according to federal data, and is the fastest-warming US state.
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📸 : Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket/Getty Images
