Prince William Sound

Welcome to Field Notes, a production of the Prince William Sound Science Center.

Infectious and parasitic diseases are suspected of limiting the recovery of Pacific herring at Prince William Sound.

Because herring are schooling fish, when there are carriers of the disease in the group, the disease can sweep through the population quickly, causing irreparable damage.

These disease outbreaks are known as epizootics.

Paul Hershberger, Maureen Purcell, and Maya Groner are leading a team of researchers in exploring the prevalence and intensity of diseases and how they are transmitted in Prince William Soundherring.

Of particular interest are viral hemorrhagic septicemia virus, viral arthritic necrosis, and ichthyophonous parasite.

Hi, this is Haley Hoover with Field Notes, and today I'll be talking with you about how these diseases are affecting the prunesium sound herring population.

VHS epizootics didn't occur after confinement into the lab tanks, and this conclusion was again supported by the measurement taken upon capture with detectable levels of neutralizing antibodies occurring between 13 and 43%.

I mean, it was so cool.

My son, James, who actually was the— The catalyst for me writing the book had spent a summer working as a deckhand in Prince William Sound, I think it was, and told me, Dad, I can't believe you haven't been to Alaska.

So when he got back, he sent me a round-trip ticket to force my hand.

He made me go.

Let's talk for a minute about how difficult it was for workers to build this railway.

The Copper River and Northwestern Railway was built between 1907 and 1911 to carry ore from Kennecott to Cordova on Prince William Sound.

The copper was hauled there and then shipped south to smelters in Tacoma, Washington.

This railroad spanned a massive glacier.

Another huge story from our childhood.

On March 24th, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker ran aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound, spilling approximately 11 million gallons of crude oil.

That's good.

That's real good.

Bly Reef.

in Prince William Sound, Alaska, spilling an estimated 11 million gallons, approximately 260,000 barrels, of crude oil into the pristine marine environment.

So this doesn't hold a candle next to the Deepwater Horizon disaster or the Persian Gulf spill, but just the area where the oil spilled, it was just such a disaster.

It was such a beautiful, pristine area of this world that was just then covered with oil.

So let's go even further and check the other earthquake out and see if anything crazy happened there.

1964, the second largest earthquake ever recorded, located in Prince William Sound, Alaska.

It's a weird name.

Let's keep going because this is just mind blowing how spot on we are.

Do you remember what the Rand Corporation did in episode 138? Do you see which location is number one on this map? The exact same map that we were showing detailing the perfect geographical areas for possible underground installation sites.

Number one is Prince William Sound.

Something is there.

Based on my research, this was all found.

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.

He knew the route.

He had flown it many times.

The flight plan took them southeast from Anchorage over Prince William Sound and through the coastal mountains, a route that threads between the peaks of the Chugach range and follows the coastline toward Juneau, a route that requires navigating through mountain passes and over glaciers and along fjords where the weather can change from clear to zero visibility in minutes.

The weather that day was deteriorating.

also still a lot of uncertainty around how to tell for sure that a slope is about to fail or to warn people if it does.

For now, on-the-ground monitoring and warning work largely focuses on just one landslide in Prince William Sound.

But Staley says applying that work elsewhere could take years, if not decades.

So there are things that we could do, but there's no one simple answer and none of it's easy and all of it takes time.