Tremors

A view of the Alaska Railroad after the Great Quake of 1964. USGS photo Two days after I moved with my family to the middle of Alaska I learned about the earthquakes. Every 15 minutes or so, monitoring stations in the state detect one. Most aren’t large, or even felt far beyond their epicenters. Some begin far out to sea and appear as barely more than a tiny spike on a graph somewhere. Often they occur in the southeast, hundreds of miles from the small town near Fairbanks where we now live. In a very active period, tens of thousands of quakes may register, and in 2018—a banner year—the Alaska Earthquake Center recorded 54,000. Two days ago, on August 17, the day before my sons started classes at their new school, there were at least 28. All this seismic action is generated by subduction, the process by which one of the earth’s massive crust plates slowly slips beneath another. In Alaska’s case, it’s the Pacific Plate pushing under the North American Plate, upon which the state sits.…