Crazy Foxes, Lousy Weather, Earthquakes, and Atomic Bombs!

Attu and Kiska--during World War II, the Japanese invaded North America at only those two locations.  And where are those strange-sounding places?  Well, not on any road that we can reach on our trip up the Alaska Highway, that’s for sure.  And not even by the Alaska Marine Highway Ferry System.  They are two of the 200 islands that make up the Aleutian Island chain.  Attu is located at the far western end of the chain, about 1,500 air miles from Anchorage and Kiska is located about 250 miles east of Attu.  Both islands are so far west that the International Date Line would lie to their east if the line hadn’t been bent far to the west around them.  So, instead of being on a different day than the rest of Alaska, the Aleutians are just in a different time zone—Aleutian time—one hour behind the rest of Alaska.  Even Unalaska-Dutch Harbor, the only Aleutian town of consequence, the only one on Alaska time, and the only one that can be reached by regularly scheduled ferries or commercial airlines, is still located 800 miles southwest of Anchorage and 1,000 miles east of Attu! 

The Aleutian Islands contain four island groups: the Fox, Andreanof, Rat, and Near Islands (“near” Russia, which named them).  Interestingly, despite these names, there are no native foxes or rats (in fact, no native land mammals at all nor any biting insects) on the Aleutians.  Perhaps the mosquitoes were all blown out to sea by the constant windstorms, known as “williwaws,” that frequent the islands.  When I landed on Shemya in 1992, the aircrew pointed to the wind gauge outside the airfield terminal.  Instead of a windsock, it was a driftwood log suspended by a logging chain from a long arm (driftwood because there are no trees in the Aleutians).  Their tongue-in-cheek warning was “If the log is at 45 degrees, stay on the plane!” 

To relate only one example of typical Aleutian weather, when our plane left Anchorage, it stopped at Adak Island to refuel.  That was not because it needed fuel to reach Shemya (which is 30 miles east of Attu), but because, if necessary, they had to be able to circle Shemya for 3 hours.  This was so the crew could await a diminishing of high crosswinds or a fog bank or find a hole in a 10,000-foot high cloud bank commonly shrouding the island.  If not successful at landing in that length of time, they still had to have enough fuel to get back to Adak. 

Weather in the Western Aleutians is much the same year round—wind, fog, wind, rain, wind, snow--with temperatures ranging from 11 to 60 degrees F through the year.  Annual total precipitation is only around 21 inches.  However, snow generally “falls” horizontally due to winds off the Bering Sea, instead of more normal vertical snowfall!  If you want to learn more about Aleutian weather and its effects on humans, read “The Thousand Mile War” (see the reading list in my profile).

Three mammal species were introduced to the Aleutians during the historic period.  Two rodents, roof rats and deer mice, were accidentally brought to the islands in ship cargo.  In the late 1800's, the native sea otters disappeared due to over-hunting for furs for export to China.  So, in order to stay in business, the fur trappers purposely introduced Arctic foxes, a different color on different islands to prevent crossbreeding, and the foxes soon became feral.  The Aleutian Canada goose was then thought to have become extinct due to foxes consuming both young birds and eggs.  However, a surviving population of the big birds was discovered on Buldir Island in 1962.  To protect the rare bird, the government eliminated the foxes.  Today they are present only on Shemya, where they have been allowed to stay as a way to deter birds from nesting and interfering with the operation of military aircraft. 

The foxes on Shemya are the blue color-phase of the Arctic Fox, but do not have a white coat in winter like their cousins in the high arctic.  The tattered looking coat that occurs when these foxes shed their winter pelt has given them the nickname “scruffy.”  They are completely unafraid of humans due to being land-locked with us on a 4-mile by 2-mile island for 70 years.  For the same reason, they are now so inbred that some are nearly blind, others walk with a peculiar sideways gait, and I seriously doubt many can still hunt due to being fed handouts by personnel assigned to the island.  When I got out of the truck that brought me from the Shemya airfield to the dormitory where I stayed, one of the scruffies walked up to me, lifted its leg, and peed on my shoe.  I guess he knew I was new “territory” and he was just marking me as his territory! 

But enough about the animals and weather; it’s on to the reasons that the geology of the Aleutians is important.  The Aleutian Islands are the tops of submerged volcanic mountains belonging to a range stretching more than 1200 miles into the Pacific Ocean from the Alaskan Peninsula.  This partially submerged continuation of the Alaska Range separates the North American Plate from the Pacific Plate.  At this plate boundary, the Pacific Plate is subducting beneath the NA Plate, creating the deep Aleutian Trench on the Pacific side of the islands.  Due to the heat generated by friction between the plates, the Aleutians contain more than 25 active volcanoes—13 over 5,000 feet high.  The USGS photo below shows Mt. Kanaga on Adak Island during a 1994 eruption.

Some of the largest earthquakes in the world occur in the Aleutians because they are located on a plate boundary, a subduction zone, and part of that Pacific “Ring of Fire” discussed in an earlier post.  A 1965 earthquake in the Western Aleutians had an 8.7 Richter Magnitude, 6^th greatest on record worldwide (the 1964 Good Friday Quake, centered in Prince William Sound, was a magnitude 9.2, 2^nd largest ever recorded).  The 1965 Aleutian event not only caused extensive ground shaking, but also produced a tsunami that measured 35 feet on Shemya Island.  The tectonic setting of Shemya in the western end of the Aleutian Islands results from an oblique-angle collision of the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate.  In 1975, Shemya experienced a 7.5 magnitude earthquake that actually did more damage to its military facilities than the larger one 10 years earlier.  In 1986, a magnitude 8.0 earthquake was centered near Kiska Island, in the same general area as an 8.6 magnitude quake in 1957.  Finally, on June 19 of last year, Shemya experienced a magnitude 6.0 earthquake, but no tsunami.  A U.S. Geological Survey map showing earthquake epicenters and magnitudes in the Aleutians can be viewed below.

The Air Force closed Eareckson Air Station on Shemya in 1995 and the Navy closed its 6,000-person naval base at Adak, also built during WWII, in 1997, several years after I was on both islands.  The military facilities remaining on Shemya are now operated by DoD contractors.  The base at Adak was completely deactivated, cleaned up, turned over to a native corporation, and resettled by several hundred Native Alaskans.  I worked on the cleanup of hazardous waste on both of those islands.  In 2010, the Coast Guard closed its station on Attu.  This last military presence in the Aleutians ended 68 years after the Japanese landed on that island.

Next time: I mentioned atomic bombs in the Aleutians, but spent too much time on weather and animals.  So, the next post will be about those bombs.