Gulf of Alaska

accounts differ on how much sight matters and later tags found active pursuit guided by sound with no steady body angle of the kind that hunting for silhouettes against the light above would need one sperm whale was caught on camera at close range though in an unusual setting.

In the Gulf of Alaska, a whale came in to a fishing longline carrying sablefish, also called black cod, and a camera and a microphone caught it at the same moment.

The whale was side-on to the camera.

It sat at a known distance as it touched the line, so the stretch from the tip of its nose to the hinge of its jaw could be worked out, and from that, its total length.

And now you have atmospheric rivers where it's just this constant deluge from the north.

Most of our storms come from the Pacific Northwest and in the Gulf of Alaska and then work their way southeast.

And they do these hookups.

They used to call them a pineapple express because they would be a plume of moisture from Hawaii up to Southern California.

Yeah, there's a lot going on.

Really? Yeah, the Gulf of Alaska, the northern, the polar jet, we call it, it's getting more busy.

And so as we go into the end of October, into early November, the Pacific is going to be throwing stuff at us.

It's going to keep us busy.

As a matter of fact, we've got calm conditions once again today, much like we had yesterday.

But you can see up north up at the Gulf of Alaska.

As a matter of fact, we have a low pressure system and some clouds moving slowly southward in our direction so we will have changes in our weather pattern by the middle of the week and certainly by the end of the upcoming week.

But right now we've got bright and breezy conditions with gusts up to 24 miles per hour in Hayward, but just generally breezy in other locations right now.

We will be again tomorrow as high pressure is still the dominant feature in our weather.

However, over the next couple of days, we'll see low pressure dropping down from the Gulf of Alaska.

That's going to bring us cooler weather and an increasing cloudy pattern.

starting Monday.

To the southeast, the Chugach Mountains form another wall of ice and rock.

Younger and more compressed than the Alaska Range, pushed up by the same tectonic forces but closer to the coast, so they catch the moisture-laden air coming off the Gulf of Alaska and convert it into staggering amounts of snow.

The Thompson Pass area near Valdez holds the Alaska record for snowfall in a single season, eighty-one feet in the winter of 1952 to 1953.

That is not a typo.

Eighty-one feet of snow in one winter.

The weight of that snow compresses into the glaciers that flow down from the Chugach peaks, and those glaciers, in turn, carve into Prince William Sound and the coastal fjords, dropping house-sized chunks of ice into water that is thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit and will kill an unprotected human in about fifteen minutes.

Beyond the Chugach, Cook Inlet opens toward the Gulf of Alaska, a body of water known for some of the most extreme tidal variations in the world, tides that can swing thirty-five feet between high and low, exposing miles of mudflats that look like solid ground but behave like quicksand, trapping anyone who steps onto them and holding them in place while the tide comes back in at a pace that can outrun a person on foot.

To the north of the Alaska Range, the interior stretches toward the Brooks Range and the Arctic.