This is an iHeart Podcast.
Guaranteed human.
270 hours means their training's legit.
It's the smart choice for smart folk who care for their steed.
So trust the instant oil change that starts with Valvoline.
Valvoline Instant Oil Change.
Change wisely.
I'm Jake Brennan and on the Disgraceland podcast I explore the wild lives of rock stars and unbelievable true crime stories from music history.
These are the stories you haven't heard, the kind you'll end up telling someone else.
Like the time Paul McCartney spent in a notorious prison or the bizarre crime Lady Gaga is accused of.
Or that time Blondie's Debbie Harry escaped Ted Bundy.
Listen to Disgraceland on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Joy is essential and it's also elusive.
But now there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence.
Joy 101.
It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kotb.
If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting and moving on-air chats.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Joy 101 and listen now.
Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb is presented by CVS.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too.
And this is stuff you should know about earthquakes in Alaska in 1964.
I'm going to talk like this the rest of the podcast.
What do you think?
I think that 60% of the people just stop listening.
Well, they are going to be sorry because this is going to be an interesting episode.
Yeah, this is.
You know.
I had no idea how earthquake prone Alaska is, was and is, until doing this kind of research.
Oh, I was raised on that knowledge.
My family talked about it a lot.
No comment.
Hey, Chuck, I have a question.
Will you ask me the first time I was ever in an earthquake or ever felt an earthquake?
When's the first time you ever felt an earthquake?
Yesterday.
Chuck, will you ask me a follow-up question?
Will you ask what I was reading while I experienced that first earthquake?
Well, where were you and what were you reading?
I was reading this article about the Alaska earthquake of 1964, and I was at home.
Wow.
I didn't know that you guys built a trimmer.
There was one in Cuba, like a 6.8, and I felt it in central Florida plain as day.
Wow.
I've never, I lived in LA for five years and I never felt a single anything.
Yeah.
I pretty much assumed I would go the rest of my life without feeling an earthquake and nope.
Nope.
Cuba had other ideas.
Yeah.
Well, I mean after reading about how, like far away, like there's some pretty startling stuff in this episode, like as far as how far away you could feel things and like the, the upset that it caused, like around the world.
It's nuts.
Yeah.
A lot of people were upset about this for sure.
All right.
Well, we're talking about the Good Friday earthquake of 1964 in Alaska which, at the time, was the biggest well, the second largest ever in the world that they had recorded, at 92, just behind the 95 that hit Chile in 1960.
Yeah.
And considering the devastation that happened in Alaska and probably only because it happened in Alaska, it only killed 131 people, which is a lot, but I think the earthquake itself in Alaska how many people?
It's like 15 people maybe?
Yeah, I think there was actually in the whole state something like.
No, no, no.
I'm saying how many people it killed was only.
Oh, sorry.
I thought you're saying how many people lived in Alaska.
No, just like the literal earthquake of people in Alaska.
I think it was like, yeah, 15 or 16 people.
That was it from the actual earthquake.
Yeah.
I wonder why he left.
Yeah, that was why, because I thought you were making a joke and I thought it was hilarious.
So let's get to it, eh?
Well, there was one other big thing about this earthquake besides just the massiveness.
I mean, 9.5, that is awfully close to as high as you can go on the Richter scale, right?
Yeah, 9.2 was this one, yeah.
9.2, sorry, Chile was the 9.5.
Still, nothing to sneeze at, right?
Second largest earthquake on record.
One of the other reasons that it's important or significant is because it basically opened up the door for seismology and our understanding of earthquakes and tsunamis and basically everything we know about those things today, kind of kicked off with this 1964 earthquake because we were able to like go study it.
It happened at just the right time in a sense.
Yeah, for sure.
And this was a mega thrust earthquake.
And as it turns out, The most destructive kind of earthquake that the world knows is the megathrust.
Ten out of the ten of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded have been megathrust.
And that is where and you know, we've talked about this in the earthquakes episode, as well as other ones, probably the Japanese tsunami one as well
Sure.
But this megathrust earthquake is what happens when you have two tectonic plates hitting one another.
And in the case of the megathrust, the heavier one slides below the lighter one and that heavier plate just dives into the mantle.
It's you know, we talked about subduction a lot, but it subduces.
Right.
Yeah, it's subdued by the top one, right?
And as it goes further and further in, like the whole Earth's crust gets recycled over incredible spans of time.
The problem is, what causes a megathrust earthquake is that in some places that subdued plate occurs doesn't go down.
It locks with the plate on top when they converge and they just press and press, and press and press and then eventually one of them's going to give.
It's like a game of chicken or something like that.
And when they give it just slips, and it slips really quickly and an entire region of Earth suddenly lurches forward like 50 feet.
And when that happens, that's where you get like 10 out of the 10 most powerful earthquakes.
That's where they come from.
They're all megathrust earthquakes, and that's how they're produced.
That's right.
The one in 64 in Alaska was at the Alaska Aleutian subduction zone.
And that's where the plates here in North America slide over the Pacific plates is where they meet one another.
And I think it runs from the Gulf of Alaska.
And as we'll see, the epicenter was kind of right there on the waterfront almost.
Yeah.
But it runs along the Gulf of Alaska to Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula.
Which is an island in Russia.
That's right.
Yeah, it's basically like the worst place to live.
But at the time when people were settling along Alaska, Seward and what was the other big city that was affected by this?
Anchorage and then a bunch of other slightly smaller cities.
They didn't know that the subduction zone existed.
It's nothing you can walk up to and point to.
This thing exists under the oceans offshore.
So they didn't know, but they found out in a big way after this earthquake that, oh yeah, actually There's a subduction zone.
And as a matter of fact, the whole theory of plate tectonics is correct.
This was another thing that it proved or showed.
Yeah.
So, you know, you said that that can happen really quickly.
That's kind of what happens with these megathrust earthquakes, and why they're so kind of spectacular is that the speed at which it happens.
And then in this case, just like how much was was moving.
They said that the plates move they estimate between 30 to 60 feet kind of all at the same time and that the area that moved this is staggering was 500 miles by 125 miles.
Suddenly moved 60 feet, like, in seconds.
Yeah, it's just, yeah, it's hard to believe.
Right.
And so again, like this 500 by 125 mile chunk Anchorage, Valdez sorry Valdez Seward and a bunch of other towns are like on that chunk of land that suddenly lurched forward.
So not only did the land lurch, this earthquake just had all sorts of crazy effects, in part because the earthquake itself 92, lasted for like four minutes.
Four minutes of a 9.2 earthquake sounds terrifying and crazy destructive.
Yeah, this was on March 27th of that year at about 5.30, 6 p.m. is when it kicked off.
And you know when I talked about like how far reaching it was.
Here are some like pretty startling examples.
There were water level changes registered across every United States state except for Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware.
And when you see things like a well or a pond sloshing back and forth, like water that doesn't normally move around is being moved, those are called seash waves.
And those were reported as far away as Australia and South Africa.
Yeah.
Can't you see some little Australian kid going, pa, the pond's moving.
It's a good Australian kid.
Yeah, I thought so too.
What do you call them?
Seishwaves?
I call them Seishwaves.
Seishwaves.
Okay.
So in the Gulf, the Gulf of Mexico, fishing boats sank off Louisiana because those sea waves sloshing back and forth in the Gulf of Mexico was so potent that it swamped some boats and sank them in the Gulf of Mexico, which is nowhere near Alaska.
Yeah, it swayed the space needle.
And, by the way, you maybe have been reading too much German on the show, because I think it probably would be Seich in German.
Yeah, something happened.
My brain like just ticked into just enough German that I mispronounce stuff a lot now.
Well, I may be wrong, too, because maybe it's a German word.
I have no idea.
Well, let's spell it for everybody, and then the listeners can make up for themselves how to pronounce it.
Shall we?
I'll take the first letter.
You take the second.
We'll just alternate like that.
Okay.
S-E-I-C-H-E-E-E-E.
Waves.
Just want to get the end.
Yeah, that thing rocked the Space Needle, which is about a thousand miles away.
And they did, you know, geological surveys afterward.
They showed some parts of the coast were close to 40 feet higher than they used to be.
Other parts were up to eight feet lower than they used to be.
It literally changed the coastline of Alaska as much as 50 feet in some parts.
And this is the kind of thing you think of when you think of an earthquake like in a movie, like train tracks getting curled up and telephone lines snapping like toothpicks and cars being sucked into the earth.
This is the kind of thing that presents a challenge to The Rock.
Yeah, exactly.
Only he could save us.
Exactly.
Unfortunately he was just a little tyke if he was even born at this time so he couldn't help anybody.
One of the things that just fascinates me is that there were entire swaths of forest on the coastline that dropped into the ocean.
Not like, oh, the land's caving in and all these trees are like falling over down into the ocean.
The entire stretch of forest still standing upright just plunged downward into the ocean and was covered by the water.
It just dropped.
Yeah.
And that to me just is crazy fascinating.
I like anything underwater I find fascinating, but also the idea of that happening like that suddenly is just mind boggling to me.
Anything underwater is fascinating.
Anything that's not supposed to be underwater that is underwater.
Ah, okay.
Have you seen The Drowned House?
I don't think so.
It's like a found footage, but it's actually good found footage.
It's an indie film where these scuba divers are exploring this house.
That was like at the bottom of a reservoir.
So it's now underwater.
And just that alone is awesome.
But the plot's pretty cool, too.
So I recommend it.
It's scary.
You're going deep with your horror.
I mean, there's just so much bad horror out there that you really have to hunt.
Yeah.
And I didn't mean that to be a pun, by the way.
Going deep with the horror?
Yeah, underwater.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, that German part of me, I'm taking everything quite literally.
There's no such thing as anything funny.
You know we're going to talk a lot about the effects of the water because again some pretty like devastating and remarkable stuff happened there.
I was right.
It was only about 15 people were killed from the actual earthquake.
Most of the people died in the tsunamis that followed.
Right.
There was one big one and a lot of smaller ones.
I think the big one reached a wave, reached a height of about 200 feet.
Which is incredible to think about it.
You know as far south as California.
Like 12 people died in California from an earthquake that happened in Alaska.
Yeah, it went southward.
It also went westward, went right past Hawaii, all the way to Japan.
It had kind of petered out by the time it hit Japan.
But I mean, like that's a long way for a single wave to travel.
I mean, 200 feet, that's just nuts, right?
Yeah, that's a big wave.
It is.
It's a giant.
So with a tsunami, though, you have a really long time.
You kind of have some warning.
After an earthquake, you can expect if you're along the coast that a tsunami is probably coming.
So you can get away from that.
The problem was that all sorts of different towns and communities along the coast got swamped almost immediately with tsunamis.
Not 200-foot tsunamis, but still enough to wreck an entire town.
That was another thing that the science finally got to the bottom of.
But in some of these tsunamis, like for example, there's a village called Chenega.
And four minutes after the earthquake, it just got washed away.
There were 68 people who lived there.
23 of them died.
And the only thing that survived, as far as their buildings are concerned, was the schoolhouse, which was built on higher ground.
100 feet above sea level.
So like everything else in the town was just gone thanks to a tsunami that hit like lightning fast.
Yeah, I've got one for everyone here.
Valdez.
At Port Valdez they were, you know, everything kind of along the coastline.
There was obviously swept into the ocean.
32 people very sadly passed in Valdez And it ended up catching on fire the oil tankers and stuff that were there.
And then those were brought out to sea.
So like you talk about a movie, like oil tankers on fire in a wave being transported across the ocean.
Yeah, for sure.
And then one of the other problems with Port Valdez was that the town was built on sand and gravel, not bedrock.
And one of the things about a megathrust earthquake is it liquefies the soil.
It turns what seemed to be totally solid ground into into essentially a liquid and it can swallow stuff up like almost immediately.
So huge parts of that town were also swallowed up by the earth all of a sudden.
Like this is biblical end times kind of stuff, you know?
Yeah.
And you know, at the risk of just going on and on, I got one more, I think, and then we can probably take a break.
But if you're talking about Anchorage, you know the biggest city there, that got.
You know in Alaska at least that got hit.
There was a landslide because it also triggered landslides.
We should have mentioned that.
And the entire business district sank about nine feet.
There were some building collapses, to be sure, but others just kind of like the forest just dropped, like you know, anywhere from nine to 20 feet below ones that were just on the other side of the street.
Did you see photos of that?
Oh, yeah.
Life magazine has a.
I mean there's a ton of good photos online that are just kind of hard to wrap your head around, like what you're looking at sometimes.
Yeah, it takes a second for sure.
I like one of those 3D eye posters, but with earthquake stuff instead.
We did a whole episode on those.
We did.
And if I remember correctly, that was pretty interesting.
Yeah, the magic eye thing.
You want to take that break you mentioned?
Yeah, we'll take a break and talk about sort of what happened after right after this.
If your service lights on, trust the techs with the training.
270 hours with zero complaining.
They train under the hood.
They train down in the pit.
Down in the pit.
270 hours means their training's legit.
It's the smart choice for smart folk who care for their steed.
So trust the instant oil change that starts with Valvoline.
Valvoline Instant Oil Change.
Change wisely.
Hey, I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb.
Okay, if you know me, you know this.
I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy.
So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together.
We're gonna have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people, like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming.
I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult.
There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression.
I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety.
Olympic champ Shawn Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast.
There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me.
It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us.
We just have to find it.
Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Jake Brennan and on my podcast Disgraceland, I tell the stories behind music's biggest names, the moments that shaped them, haunted them and changed music history forever.
Like how the story of the Foo Fighters and Dave Grohl isn't just about music.
Imagine that.
You're in the biggest band on the planet, as Dave Grohl was in 1994 in Nirvana.
And the phone rings and you learn that your singer, your friend, the reluctant voice of a generation, Kurt Cobain, is dead.
This is a story of fame, pressure, friendship, and the weight of fulfilling your destiny.
Learn more about the moment everything changed.
Disgraceland is part of the Exactly Right Network.
Listen to new episodes every Tuesday, bonus episodes Thursday and rewinds on Sunday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
So four minutes later, the earthquake stops, but there's still tsunamis.
There's fires at sea, even like whole towns have collapsed.
Like it takes a little while for the dust to finally settle.
When it does, I think, like the next day.
Lyndon Johnson, who was president at the time, said Alaska as a whole is a major disaster area.
Remember, I said like telephone poles snapped and there were no roads anymore or railroads.
That meant that people couldn't communicate with the outside world.
So if you had family and friends outside of Alaska and they heard about this earthquake, they couldn't get in touch with you and you couldn't get in touch with them.
So it was a very hairy time for a lot of people until they could find out whether their loved ones were alive or not.
And I think the damage is something like $3 billion in today's dollars.
Which, again, like this is a state with like a population of, I think, 250,000 people at the time.
Like it was not populated at all.
But that's how much damage that earthquake did still.
Yeah, they had to.
You know, I mentioned earlier that it changed the shape of Alaska and its coastline.
It was so drastic that they had to kind of redraw the shipping lanes and say like hey, like you can't go that way anymore because of this.
And they had to kind of redraw all of that area.
Some people were, you know, Alaska strong, so we're not leaving.
We're going to build on top of where we were.
Other people said, you know what, I'm going to go higher.
Entire towns were gone.
And then... popped up in other places.
And Valdez is a great example because the Army Corps of Engineers came in and said you know, Josh Clark one day will say that this was built on a gravel foundation.
So you shouldn't even rebuild there.
And there were only about 500, you know plus or minus some people living there at the time and they said you got three years to get out of here.
We got a new Valdez for you about four miles away.
And that's generally what happened.
People left set up the new town of Valdez, which now has close to 4000 people, and they burned the rest of what was there down, just to make sure that people didn't kind of like set up and squat there.
Yeah, it's kind of cool.
You can go hike the old Valdez town.
There's an intersection still of the two main drags.
And I think like there's the street sign up still.
And then they have plaques showing what used to be where.
It looks like a pretty cool hike.
Yeah.
So, Chuck, we talked about how this kind of changed science.
I think we should really kind of expand on that because it really changed science, Chuck.
Yeah.
And, you know, this next part we need to thank specifically.
I think Livia used a Smithsonian Magazine article by Christian Elliott for this part.
So big thanks to Christian Elliott for all the hard work.
And Livia.
So, well, of course, and Livia always.
She's our North Star after all.
But you know, we've already kind of said it, but I guess more specifically we should say that, you know, at this time in 1964, the idea of what we knew about plate tectonics was not, you know, entrenched.
Like, people kind of had a good idea of what they thought was going on.
For a long time people had been checking out maps and saying like hey, I think that this used to be connected right here and maybe things drifted apart.
But it was still sort of... being actively debated at the time.
And this really kind of, like, laid bare, like, yeah, this is not a hypothesis anymore.
Yeah.
I mean, it's crazy to think that plate tectonics wasn't accepted until the 60s, but that's exactly how it was.
So this was such a massive earthquake.
It just presented all sorts of different places where evidence kind of came along that said okay, explain this.
What explains this?
What explains that?
And it turns out that plate tectonics essentially was the only theory that fit.
You know, that explained how the Earth went up here, or how it sunk here, or how it moved 50 feet onto the sea here.
Or why this, you know, this town just got swallowed up.
All of this could be explained by plate tectonics and not the other rival theories.
I think that the other rival theory was that earthquakes were God's will and plate tectonics just explains it better.
Yeah, I agree.
Yeah.
This is obviously a goldmine for the U.S.
Geological Survey.
So they got people to Alaska like really quick and, you know, got out all their doohickeys and whirly gigs and measuring tape.
Sure.
And we're like, hey, we can really learn a lot from this stuff.
You know, people are being taken care of.
So now we need to kind of figure out what happens moving forward.
One of the interesting things they found, and some of this stuff gets really, really interesting.
I think that popped up especially.
I'll just tease out the fungus that's coming among us soon.
Nice.
But they looked at those forests that you were talking about that sunk below the ocean.
They filled up with like sediment and seawater and stuff.
And they were digging around down there trying to just study it.
And they kept digging.
And they said, you know what?
There's other like below this stuff.
We're finding older land plants.
And so this has happened before you guys like, probably more than several times over the last, like thousands or millions of years.
And it's going to happen again.
Yeah, can't you kind of just see like if you sped it up like a forest just sinking into the sea and then being covered with sediment and a new forest grows on top of it and then sinks into the sea?
And if you do it fast enough, that Bugs Bunny powerhouse song just starts playing.
That's right.
Like it just becomes a conveyor belt.
Yeah, it's just nuts to think about.
But that's exactly what they found with that.
And they found that from the Alaska earthquake.
And they were like, okay, didn't know that this happened.
Now that we know this is a thing, we can start looking for it in other places we think are earthquake prone.
And they started looking around and they found it in other places.
As a matter of fact, the big one along the Cascadian subduction zone that threatens California every moment of every day.
We know about that thanks to the science that they figured out, thanks to the Alaska earthquake of 64.
Yeah, it birthed a new science in paleoseismology, which is, I mean, that doesn't happen every day.
We try all the time to birth new sciences, and no one's listening.
No, but we don't have cool names like paleoseismology or megathrust, and maybe we should rethink things.
That's true.
Megathrust is the sexiest science.
It sounds like a GWAR album.
Oh, it does, actually.
Yeah.
Another thing was that we kind of talked about that we didn't really understand before were tsunamis, tidal waves,
Mm-hmm.
And of course, we knew about tsunamis and tidal waves.
And I guess scientists kind of had a pretty decent grasp on, like okay, an epicenter of a major earthquake out at sea is going to send a tsunami.
And maybe we can even calculate how long it'll take to get there and all that stuff.
But They were baffled by why some of these coastal areas were hit by tsunamis within just a couple of minutes of the earthquake.
It just did not fit into the understanding of tidal waves at the time.
Yeah, for sure.
So they did some literal digging and some figurative digging.
And they came to.
This was the unique shape of Alaska's coastline at the time where you know very jagged and you'd have some deep fjords where glaciers had cut into the land.
That would send silt onto the ocean floor.
And the quake just kind of stirred all this stuff up.
Like you know, sand in a glass that had been settled down there for centuries and centuries.
And these were basically underwater landslides.
That caused these waves.
So it was, I think a new term was birthed, which was landslide tsunami.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like dropping something heavy in a bathtub and plook like that.
But it's a little different.
But the same thing, kind of.
That's right.
And you, man, you got to tell them about this fungus.
This is hard to believe.
I think this is yours.
I'll tee it up for you.
All right, tee it up.
There is a mystery with some fungus.
Okay.
Get to it.
Yeah.
So Cryptococcus, that's pretty easy.
Cryptococcus gatti, two T's, two I's.
No, no.
Cryptococcus gatti.
Yeah, gatti.
That's right.
Isn't that how you have to say it?
I think so.
But you have to go up really high pitched.
Gatti?
Yeah.
So this is a microscopic fungus.
It can be pretty bad.
It can cause fatal infections.
But it's native to the tropics.
So Alaska is like, we don't have to worry about that kind of thing.
Sure.
It grows on rotting wood in the tropics, and apparently it survives pretty well in seawater.
At the turn of the 20th century.
Apparently, some of this fungus ended up among us by way of a ballast in the water of a ship that was going en route from Brazil to Vancouver.
And off the coast of the Pacific Northwest.
There, once this stuff was spilled out of that ballast, it said hey, we like the seawater.
We're going to adapt, and we're here.
You don't know, we're here yet, but we're going to be here in 1964 when this tsunami happens, and it's going to spread us now far and wide, right.
Yeah.
I mean that tsunami took this stuff that had just been hanging out off the coast, that no one even knew was there, except maybe that ship captain, if he was nefarious.
That's right.
And just spread it inland.
This is 1964.
And now all of a sudden the fungus is like, okay, we're in a new habitat, new ecosystem.
Let's get to adapting here.
And it did.
It survived that tsunami and started to readapt to life on land, but life on land in the tundra essentially.
And so, as that stuff started adapting and adapting, by the 90s it was capable of infecting people again.
And there was this mysterious outbreak of of cryptococcus gatti, and they could not figure out what the heck was going on because, as far as anybody knew, the only place you found that was in the tropics, on rotting wood.
I guess some epidemiologist kind of put two and two together based on the tsunami.
He was like basically, the only way you could have taken this stuff and gotten it all over the land is from a tsunami.
So he figured that's what happened.
Yeah, and it's i.
Just i would love to know more about the story of how they traced it to this one ship that went from brazil to vancouver.
You know obviously, shipping records, but it's still like quite a bit of uh, scientific detective work.
Yeah, for sure.
For sure.
And I'm not sure if he figured that part out, too, or not.
But I know that I was reading in that article by Christian Elliott in Smithsonian.
He's talking about how the guy figured out how it got on to land, at least.
Yeah, pretty cool.
All right.
So we'll take our final break here and we'll talk about maybe a silver lining that came out of this right after this.
Valvoline Instant Oil Change presents Wisdom from the Road.
Summer means wide open spaces and a whole lot of extra miles.
The last place you want your engine to give out is halfway to nowhere.
Out here, low oil or a weak battery is just an ambush waiting to happen.
That's why every oil change at Valvoline Instant Oil Change includes an 18-point maintenance check.
These techs are trained to help spot issues early and keep your riding easy.
Change wisely.
Hey, I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb.
OK, if you know me, you know this.
I'm always searching for inspiration, for support and useful tools to help maximize joy.
So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together.
We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people, like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming.
I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult.
There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression.
I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety.
Olympic champ Shawn Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast.
There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me.
It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us.
We just have to find it.
Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Jake Brennan and on the Disgraceland podcast I explore the wild lives of rock stars and unbelievable true crime stories from music history.
These are the stories you haven't heard, the kind you'll end up telling someone else.
Like the time Paul McCartney spent in one of the world's most notorious prisons.
Imagine that.
You're Paul McCartney.
It's 1980.
You're an ex-Beatle.
And you're doing time in one of Japan's worst prisons, right there alongside Yakuza gangsters, and for a ridiculous charge.
Or the bizarre crime Lady Gaga is accused of.
Who is the artist?
Lady Gaga is being accused of doing the unthinkable to, after allegedly stealing her music and style, to become famous.
And what about that time Blondie's Debbie Harry escaped a serial killer?
The man who had given her that ride she barely escaped from was Ted Bundy.
Listen to Disgraceland on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right.
So you know, anytime something like this happens, there is usually a scientific silver lining.
As far as just learning you know about things that took place, learning how to maybe not prevent in the future but at least get more lead time in the future.
And then also and most importantly, probably is like how to build and where to build moving forward.
Yeah.
And the Alaska earthquake taught us, not there.
Nope, not there either.
Not there.
Not there.
And it just goes on like that, right?
But people were like, no, we want to build there.
So one of the things that we learned how to do was to, number one, figure out where not to build, but also how to build so that, like buildings just didn't immediately collapse and whole towns weren't just swallowed up at the drop of a Richter, you know.
Yeah, for sure.
Uh, Alaska as a state started adopting.
You know obviously, new building codes and you know, especially if it was like a big building, if it was like a like a large apartment building, which I mean I don't think Alaska has a ton of those, but you know larger buildings.
They are now kind of neck and neck with California for having the strictest building codes.
And it's worked pretty well.
There was another big earthquake in Anchorage in 2018 that injured about 117 people.
It was a 7.0 earthquake. and caused $76 million in damages.
And stuff got destroyed, like roads and stuff, to be sure.
But no one died.
There were no really serious injuries.
And a lot of those buildings stayed upright.
Yeah.
And so one reason or one way that they developed those building codes and also where to build, was the widespread deployment of seismographs.
Right,
I think in the 1964 earthquake, there were only two seismograph stations in all of Alaska.
And the oldest one had been installed 60 years before.
Right after that they started throwing seismic stations up all over Alaska, around California, in Western Canada.
And we started to develop more and more information.
One thing I saw is that the The thing that really got seismographs out there though, was the arms race, the nuclear arms race.
We were using seismographs to listen out for other countries secretly testing nukes.
And that that's what we were using them for initially.
And then people were like, let's start actually listening for earthquakes.
So by being able to get a lot of information about big and small quakes, how frequent they were, where they were epicentered.
We were able to really kind of zero in and come up with entire maps of where to build and where not to build.
There's this National Seismic Hazard Map, which is a party in a map, from what I understand.
And we have that thanks to this earthquake and the science that it kicked off.
Yeah, for sure.
I think just like less than 10 years later, there were up to 90 seismic stations in Alaska alone.
And then by the mid-2000s, I think, 197 sites in Alaska and Western Canada.
That was just over like a three year period through the National Science Foundation's U.S.
Array Project from 2014 to 2017 is when they got all those.
And then what we learned about tsunamis and people living along the coast.
That led to a lot of new information as far as what was end up being the National Tsunami Warning Center.
Yeah, we definitely got way better at predicting where tsunamis would hit, how bad it would be.
And one of the other things too is I guess people didn't really realize this, but if you were living on the coast probably if you were of European descent, I'll bet if you were indigenous you already knew this.
But if you feel an earthquake, go run to high land.
Because there's probably a tsunami coming within a couple minutes.
That seemed to have been widely understood only after the earthquake in Alaska, which I guess makes sense if we didn't understand local tsunamis at the time.
Yeah, for sure.
I think the retreating glaciers are potentially causing even more trouble, as far as today goes in Alaska.
That permafrost could make the land more vulnerable to destruction.
I know I mentioned the 2018 one.
There was an even bigger one just a few years ago in 2021 that reached 8.2%.
But being Alaska, it was fortunately in a more remote area.
Yeah.
And so a lot less damage.
That's kind of, you know, the one benefit of Alaska.
The reason this one was so bad was because it hit the towns and cities along the coast.
Right, exactly, for sure.
Yeah, and the fossil fuel industry was joyous because their pipeline, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, did not suffer much damage in an earthquake in 2002, I think.
Yeah, I mean, that's one of the big worries is that there's so much oil activity there and fossil fuel infrastructure that, you know, another big one that did a lot of damage to that could cause You know, big, obviously human concerns, but very much could devastate the region environmentally.
For sure.
And I mean in part because so the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
In this case, it was the Denali fault that caused a 79 magnitude earthquake, the 2002 one.
And that pipeline goes right across the fault.
So, yes, it is a very seems like a tenuous technology as it stands.
For sure.
You got anything else about the Alaska earthquake of 1964?
I do not.
Nope.
Okay.
I don't either.
So I guess that means it's time for Listener Mail.
Well, we're going to forego Listener Mail for the next couple of weeks to chat a little bit like a fireside chat.
Okay.
About our upcoming sea voyage.
With Virgin Cruises, About the Valiant Lady, we're going to be taken to sea.
Okay.
Taking and taken to sea.
We're going from New York City to Bermuda October 2nd through 7th.
With our colleagues, our old pals.
You know that we started the stuff shows with way back in the day, a couple of which stuff mom never told you and stuff they don't want you to know, will be there with us.
We'll be doing a live show.
We'll be doing some other stuff.
They keep talking about these other events we're going to do.
I don't know if it's like a trivia night or definitely like meet and greets and stuff, but we're pretty excited about it.
Yeah, for sure.
And I think, did you say we're going to Bermuda?
Yeah.
Okay.
So I think it's worth saying again we're going to Bermuda on this and it's going to be a pretty fun five night cruise.
And I believe there's still passages that can be booked, but they're actually selling like pretty fast.
I'm impressed with us, Chuck.
I know.
I'm excited.
And we just found out.
You know Matt and Noel and Ben with Stuff They Don't Want You To Know have been on one of these before.
And they said it was a great time.
And they said, here's a little pro tip.
You know the venue where we're doing our actual live podcast portion.
You know can't fit 2700 like everybody on board.
Right.
And they said, hey, pro tip here is when you get on board, you sign up for the different stuff.
So I think through the app so they like tell everybody to get on there and sign up for your live show.
But I think they're also like, they're going to have cameras and you can watch it on TV in your room as well.
Oh, neat.
Closed Circuit.
Is there anything more wondrous than Closed Circuit TV?
I don't know.
We should do a show about it.
That should be our onboard show.
That's right.
Yes.
So you can go to virgin.com slash stuff at sea, right?
Yeah, or just Google stuff at sea, Virgin Cruises, stuff you should know cruise.
It'll all get you there.
And there really is no better time to learn how to walk around with a parrot on your shoulder than this particular cruise.
Agreed.
So yeah, so we'll see you guys in October.
But even before then, we'll see you on the next episode of Stuff You Should Know.
And in the meantime, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio.
For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
I'm Jake Brennan and on the Disgraceland podcast I explore the wild lives of rock stars and unbelievable true crime stories from music history.
These are the stories you haven't heard, the kind you'll end up telling someone else.
Like the time Paul McCartney spent in a notorious prison or the bizarre crime Lady Gaga is accused of.
Or that time Blondie's Debbie Harry escaped Ted Bundy.
Listen to Disgraceland on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Joy is essential and it's also elusive.
But now there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence.
Joy 101.
It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kotb.
If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting and moving on-air chats.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Joy 101 and listen now.
Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb is presented by CVS.
My husband is at a spa resort with his mistress right now and I'm calling the hotel to confront them both.
Wait a minute, Dakota.
She's calling the hotel while they're checked in together?
Yeah, that's right, Sophia.
And it gets worse.
It's Vacate, the Vacation Week on the OK Storytime podcast, where she caught him buying gifts on Amazon and then taped a 10-page letter inside his luggage before he flew out.
So she planted evidence before he even took off?
And spoiler Sophia.
Two years later, karma hits so hard he's calling his ex-wife in tears saying about his mistress.
What a mistake that was.
To find out what happened.
Listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is an iHeart podcast, guaranteed human.
