Image: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
In the middle of the Alaskan wilderness, things can shift on a magnificent, Earth-shattering scale, and none of us are any the wiser.One such event occurred last October, when 200 million metric tons of rock—the equivalent to the weight of 1,104,972 blue whales—slid off the side of a remote mountain in Southeast Alaska, sending debris flying and launching a tsunami large enough to be measured by a tidal gauge nearly 100 miles away.Only after the fact, with the aid of scientific equipment, have researchers been able to detect the event, reports The Alaska Dispatch News, despite the fact that the landslide is one of the world's largest in recent years—as well as the largest in North America since 1980.The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University posted photos of the rockslide to its Facebook page last week, including an aerial shot of an island six miles away. The photo shows that the powerful tsunami was strong enough to strip away the island's trees.Normally, a geologic event in such a remote area would go unnoticed, but for technology developed and monitored by scientists on the the other side of the country in New York. And it's a good thing, too—with the advent of climate change, events like this are increasing in frequency. As glaciers retreat and permafrost softens, larger shifts in land masses, including enormous landslides like this, may become more visible."Southeast Alaska has probably the most rock avalanches of huge magnitude of any place in the world," Colin Stark, professor of geology and geophysics at Lamont-Doherty, told the Dispatch News. "It's the world's hotspots for these huge rockslides and rock avalanches that drop onto glaciers."