Prince William Sound
Prince William Sound is a sound of the Gulf of Alaska on the south coast of the U.S. state of Alaska. It is located on the east side of the Kenai Peninsula. Its largest port is Valdez, at the southern terminus of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. Other settlements on the sound, which contains numerous small islands, include Cordova and Whittier plus the Alaska native villages of Chenega and Tatitlek.
History
entered Prince William Sound in 1778 and initially named it Sandwich Sound, after his patron the Earl of Sandwich. Later that year, the Sound was named to honour George III's third son Prince William Henry, then aged 13 and serving as a midshipman in the Royal Navy.In 1790, the Spanish explorer Salvador Fidalgo entered the sound, naming many of its features. Some places in the sound still bear the names given by Fidalgo, as Port Valdez, Port Gravina or Cordova. The explorer landed on the actual site of Cordova and took possession of the land in the name of the king of Spain.
In 1793, Alexander Andreyevich Baranov founded port Voskresensk in the sound, which he called Chugach Bay. The first three-masted ship, Phoenix, was the first ship built by the Russians in America. Baranov continued to support his Russian wife and children, who had moved from Siberia back to live near St. Petersburg. In Pavlovskaya, Baranov took an Aleut woman as mistress and had three mixed-race children with her. After learning that his wife had died in 1807 in Russia, he married his mistress, legitimizing their children. In 1817, Irina, his oldest daughter born in Alaska, married Semyon Yanovsky, a Russian naval officer. Late in 1818, Yanovsky was appointed as Chief Manager and successor to Baranov. That year, Baranov departed to sail back to Russia, but he died in April 1819 and was buried at sea. Alexander Andreyevich Baranov was born in 1747 in Kargopol, in St. Petersburg Governorate of the Russian Empire. He was the son of Andrey Baranov, a lower-class merchant or mestchanin, in the Russian stratified order of classes. Baranov ran away from home at the age of fifteen and went to Moscow, where he became a clerk before returning home.
After he married and his first child was born, Baranov took his young family to Siberia for its frontier opportunities. In Irkutsk, he became a trader and tax collector with his brother. Eventually, his wife left Baranov and returned to Kargopol with their daughter and two young children they had adopted. There was no divorce in the Russian Orthodox Church. Baranov supported them all from afar.
A tsunami on March 27, 1964, a result of the Good Friday earthquake, killed a number of Chugach villagers in the coastal village of Chenega and destroyed the town of Valdez. Lasting four minutes and thirty-eight seconds, the magnitude 9.2 megathrust earthquake remains the most powerful earthquake recorded in North American history, and the second most powerful earthquake recorded in world history. In Prince William Sound, Port Valdez suffered a massive underwater landslide, resulting in the deaths of 32 people between the collapse of the Valdez city harbor and docks, and inside the ship that was docked there at the time. Nearby, a 27-foot tsunami destroyed the village of Chenega, killing 23 of the 68 people who lived there; survivors out-ran the wave, climbing to high ground. Post-quake tsunamis severely affected Whittier, Seward, Kodiak, and other Alaskan communities, as well as people and property in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California. Two types of tsunamis were produced by this subduction zone earthquake. There was a tectonic tsunami produced in addition to about 20 smaller and local tsunamis. These smaller tsunamis were produced by submarine and subaerial landslides and were responsible for the majority of the tsunami damage. Tsunami waves were noted in over 20 countries, including Peru, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Japan, Mexico, and Antarctica. The largest tsunami wave was recorded in Shoup Bay, Alaska, with a height of about 220 ft.
On March 24, 1989, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef after leaving Valdez, causing a large oil spill, which resulted in massive damage to the environment, including the killing of around 250,000 seabirds, nearly 3,000 sea otters, 300 harbour seals, 250 bald eagles and up to 22 killer whales. It is considered to be one of the worst human-caused environmental disasters. The Valdez spill is the second largest in US waters, after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in terms of volume released.The oil, originally extracted at the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field, eventually impacted 1,300 miles of coastline, of which 200 miles were heavily or moderately oiled with an obvious impact.Chemical dispersant, a surfactant and solvent mixture, was applied to the slick by a private company on March 24 with a helicopter. But the helicopter missed the target area. Scientific data on its toxicity were either thin or incomplete. In addition, public acceptance of a new, widespread chemical treatment was lacking. Landowners, fishing groups, and conservation organizations questioned the use of chemicals on hundreds of miles of shoreline when other alternatives may have been available.Because Prince William Sound contained many rocky coves where the oil collected, the decision was made to displace it with high-pressure hot water. However, this also displaced and destroyed the microbial populations on the shoreline; many of these organisms are the basis of the coastal marine food chain, and others are capable of facilitating the biodegradation of oil. At the time, both scientific advice and public pressure was to clean everything, but since then, a much greater understanding of natural and facilitated remediation processes has developed, due somewhat in part to the opportunity presented for study by the Exxon Valdez spill. Despite the extensive cleanup attempts, less than ten percent of the oil was recovered.
In May 2020, a team of researchers announced that a certain mile-long slope on the Barry Arm fjord in Prince William Sound would likely trigger a catastrophic tsunami within the next two decades, or possibly even within the next twelve months. The researchers cautioned their analysis had not yet been peer-reviewed. The Alaska Department of Natural Resources subsequently issued a warning that "an increasingly likely landslide could generate a wave with devastating effects on fishermen and recreationalists".