Mountainside detachment in North S’awdáan Fiord (Tracy Arm)
Sample pages from Great wave maps collection
On August 10th, 2025, an enormous section of mountain fell into the sea near the popular cruiseship destination best known as South Sawyer Glacier. Luckily, no ships or smaller watercraft that we know of were nearby. It happened only 3 days before our annual late-summer GLOF (Glacial Outburst Flood), so folks in Áak’w Aaní were too busy preparing to pay much attention.
But this was the most earth-shaking event I’ve addressed in JuneauNature>CULTURE>Dodging-natures-tantrums probably by an order of magnitude. I’ve been a little concerned that it went under-reported not only in local media but worldwide. More recently though, a number of observers in the avalanche, mass wasting, and geology communities have been sharing information, trying to understand what happened, and what it signifies, geo-ecologically and in terms of human safety.
Here’s my synopsis. Toward the end of our Landforms class in 2022, I became interested in what we could call seaforms—the underwater counterparts of landforms. Turns out there may be some interesting interplay between tsunamis and underwater topography
