Anchorage Alaska

 


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We flew into Anchorage and spent the night there before driving off north. We were back in Anchorage 5 days later. The one thing that struck us as unusual was how late the sun was up and people were outside working on things downtown such as painting buildings. When we arrived back in Anchorage 5 days later we went over to visit the area where many of the floatplanes are kept, Lake Hood Seaplane Base. Operating continuously and open to the public, Lake Hood is the world's busiest seaplane base, handling an average of 190 flights per day. It is located on Lakes Hood and Spenard, next to Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, three miles from downtown Anchorage.

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Anchorage was 75 miles northwest of the epicenter of the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake. Lasting four minutes and 38 seconds, it was the most powerful recorded earthquake in U.S. and North American history, and the second most powerful ever measured by seismograph. It had a magnitude of 9.2, making it the second strongest earthquake in recorded history—the strongest being the 1960 Valdivia earthquake in Chile.

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The trolley tour we were on took us to Earthquake Park where you could see just how much the earth moved…. This earthquake caused the earth to move as much as 30 feet in some locations !!! Tsunami waves from this shaker were noted in over 20 countries, including: Peru, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Japan, and Antarctica. The largest tsunami wave was recorded in Shoup Bay, Alaska, with a height of about 219 feet.

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