Dear colleagues and friends,
I am pleased to share our new paper, published in Science, on the 2025 Tracy Arm landslide-tsunami in southeast Alaska:
A first-release version of the paper is attached for convenience.
The event was extraordinary: a massive landslide in Tracy Arm fjord generated a mega tsunami that ran 481 m up the opposite fjord wall; the second-highest landslide-tsunami runup ever recorded. Fortunately, it occurred early in the morning in a cruise-ship-frequented fjord, making it a remarkable near-miss rather than a disaster.
The study reconstructs the event as a full geohazard cascade: rapid glacier retreat, a collapsing mountainside, an extreme tsunami, days-long fjord resonance, and a popular cruise route spared largely by timing. It also highlights the growing need to monitor glacierized mountain landscapes where climate-driven retreat may affect slope stability and hazard exposure.
The paper has also received broad media coverage, including in the New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, CNN, Reuters, Scientific American, The Globe and Mail, NASA Earth Observatory, EOS, Popular Science, The Conversation, and so on. I also had the opportunity to discuss the study in a live interview with ABC TV Australia. A selected list of coverage is included below.
Huge thanks to Dan Shugar for leading this remarkable study, and to all co-authors for such a strong collaborative effort.
Very best,
Aram
Selected media coverage:
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New York Times:
The Guardian:
BBC:
CNN:
Reuters (Also ran on YahooNews:
Scientific American:
Globe and Mail:
NASA Earth Observatory Image of the Day:
EOS:
The Canadian Press:
Le Figaro:
El Confidencial:
Popular Science:
The Conversation:
—
Aram Fathian
Postdoctoral Associate
Department of Earth, Energy, and Environment
Water, Sediment, Hazards, and Earth-surface Dynamics (waterSHED) Lab
University of Calgary
