Alaska
When America (briefly) considered trading part of Alaska for Greenland
Part of a continuing weekly series on Alaska history by local historian David Reamer. Have a question about Anchorage or Alaska history or an idea for a future article? Go to the form at the bottom of this story.
One of the many longstanding misconceptions about Alaska is that it is an island, not metaphorically but literally. For decades, many Lower 48 classrooms featured maps that inserted Alaska off to the side, the territory and then state within a little box. So, more than a few people interpreted that to mean Alaska was an island. In 2021, Shutterfly used this tragicomic misunderstanding as the basis for a commercial.
Every good Alaskan knows their home state is about 2.5 times the size of Texas, a fact always worth remembering. Yet, as vast as Alaska is, it still would not be the largest island in the world, if it were an island. In total area, at around 836,000 square miles, Greenland is the record holder, roughly 25% larger than Alaska. And those two territories — Alaska and Greenland — have another, more historically relevant connection. In the 1940s, State Department officials considered trading part of Alaska for part of Greenland.
Alaska and Greenland first crossed paths within the expansionist mind of Secretary of State William Seward. In 1867, the same year he negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia, he also initiated discussions with Denmark to purchase the Caribbean islands of St. Thomas and St. John. Former Treasury Secretary Robert J. Walker suggested the talks expand to include Greenland and Iceland.
In 1823, President James Monroe declared an end to further European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere, where the United States would instead be the dominant power. This was the Monroe Doctrine, which would become a pillar of American foreign policy, paradoxically denouncing the imperialism of the elder countries in favor of the imperialism by the newer America. The push west across the continent and the various interventions into other North and South American nations, to varying degrees, philosophically derive from the Monroe Doctrine.
In tune with the political attitudes of the time, outright purchases were then an acceptable method of territorial expansion, including the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty (Florida), 1854 Gadsden Purchase (southern Arizona and New Mexico), and on through the 1867 Alaska Purchase. Relevant to this reading, President Andrew Jackson’s administration was the first to suggest buying Greenland, back in 1832.
Seward was a fervent Monroe Doctrine adherent and, therefore, an avid expansionist. Among other beliefs, he envisioned a world where Canada and Mexico were merged into the union. As for good old Alaska, negotiations wrapped up at the end of March 1867. The purchase treaty passed Congress and was signed by President Andrew Johnson on May 28, 1867. The territory was formally transferred in an Oct. 18, 1867 ceremony at Sitka.
So, long story short, Seward was quite willing to consider buying Greenland and Iceland. Both islands were then Danish colonies. Greenland is now an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, and Iceland became fully independent in 1944. Seward authorized Walker to research the idea, which resulted in an 1868 State Department study, “A Report on the Resources of Iceland and Greenland.”
Combined with the purchase of Alaska, Greenland’s primary appeal was as a geopolitical tool to influence the eventual acquisition of Canada. The report makes this point explicitly: “Now, the acquisition of Greenland will flank British America for thousands of miles on the north and west and greatly increase her inducements, peacefully and cheerfully, to become a part of the American Union.” With both Greenland and Canada, as previously with Alaska as well as most subsequent proposals, the desires of the actual residents were worth something between a backward glance and a blank, empty gaze. That is to say, they and their wishes mattered not at all to decision makers in Washington.
Seward eventually finalized a deal for St. Thomas and St. John. At $7,500,000, it had a higher price tag than Alaska, and the island residents even voted overwhelmingly in favor of the transition. However, the treaty was not ratified on the American side, caught as it was amid some particularly nasty political infighting. With his own reputation under assault, Seward abandoned his dreams for Greenland.
In the early 1900s, Danish officials considered selling Greenland to the U.S., an idea that evolved into a more formal swap proposal detailed in a 1910 letter from the American ambassador to Denmark, Maurice Egan, to the State Department. In order, Denmark would give Greenland to the United States in exchange for a southern group of the Philippines, including Mindanao and Palawan. Denmark would then trade those islands to Germany for regions of the northernmost German state, Schleswig-Holstein, which had historically been part of Denmark. In this, Egan was simply a messenger. He described the offer as an “audacious suggestion,” and the entire pitch died an instant death.
In 1916, Denmark agreed to sell the entire Danish West Indies, including St. Thomas and St. John, to the United States for $25 million in gold. After the official transfer in 1917, those islands are now collectively called the U.S. Virgin Islands. The proclamation for the purchase coincidentally included a declaration in which the United States officially recognized Danish authority over Greenland, that “the United States of America will not object to the Danish Government extending its political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland.” This passage represented an exception to the Monroe Doctrine and can be interpreted as America formally ceding its interest in Greenland, for the nonexistent impact that it had, even in the near future, let alone more recently.
Arctic adventurer Robert E. Peary explored Greenland extensively in the 1890s. He was also a Monroe Doctrine hardliner and attempted to influence the proceedings through the media. In a New York Times article, he stated, “Geographically, Greenland belongs to North America and the Western Hemisphere, over which we have formally claimed a sphere of influence by our Monroe Doctrine. Its possession by us will be in line with the Monroe Doctrine, and will eliminate one more possible source of future complications for us from European possession of territory in the Western Hemisphere.” Essentially, no one at the time was sufficiently impressed by his argument.
On April 9, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Denmark, more as a step toward Norway than for any regard for Denmark’s minimal strategic importance. From an imperial perspective, that left Greenland unattended. Exactly one year later, Denmark and the United States signed the Agreement Relating to the Defense of Greenland. As a defense of Greenland was, to a great extent, a defense of America and its interests, the pact allowed Americans to build, maintain, and operate whatever military, meteorological, or logistical installations on the island as deemed necessary for the war effort.
In an important detail, the agreement also declared, “The Government of the United States of America reiterates its recognition of and respect for the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Denmark over Greenland.” Article IX notes, “The Government of the United States of America will respect all legitimate interests in Greenland as well as all the laws, regulations and customs pertaining to the native population and the internal administration of Greenland.”
That said, once the war concluded, the idea of buying Greenland outright arose again. Sen. Owen Brewster of Maine declared American ownership of Greenland “a military necessity” in a Nov. 10, 1945 Collier’s magazine article straightforwardly titled “Should Greenland Be American?” Within the government, the Joint Chiefs of Staff drove the interest, seeking to at least maintain, if not expand, the American military presence in Greenland. In April 1946, State Department official John Hickerson attended a Joint Chiefs planning committee and reported, “practically every member … said our real objective as regards to Greenland should be to acquire it by purchase from Denmark.”
Reading the mood, the State Department released a study that May: “Proposals with Respect to Greenland.” The report ran through the military and political context, then considered various approaches with which to ensure a continued American presence in Greenland. Purchasing the island outright was only one of the possibilities considered.
Most of the documentation for this episode comes from letters, memos and this report. These sorts of sources can make for dry reading, but there is joy in the interagency frictions that frequently reveal themselves in the text. For example, the above report notes, “The purchase of Greenland appears to be the solution preferred by the Planning and Strategy Committee of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, although the Secretary of State has not been formally advised of this view by the Joint Chiefs of Staff themselves.” In a State Department report written by a State Department employee, the disdain for the Joint Chiefs is barely hidden between the lines.
Enter Alaska once more. As the report notes, a straight purchase would gain Denmark only money against an immeasurable loss of national pride and international prestige. Therefore, its authors considered alternatives, primarily a trade, territory for territory. In exchange for zones of military interest, America would swap juicy swaths of Alaska, Arctic land for Arctic land. Specifically, America would offer oil-rich stretches of the North Slope.
In the interest of accuracy, the following is the direct quote from the report. “In view of probable strong Danish opposition to the sale of Greenland, it has been suggested that as an alternative we seek to acquire only those areas of the island of value to us from a military viewpoint and, in return, cede to Denmark an equivalent amount of territory in the Point Barrow district of Alaska. The Danes would be permitted to develop any mineral resources found there, including petroleum, with the proviso that all oil produced be sold to this country.”
Contrary to some recent accounts of these discussions, American diplomats were well aware of the potential mineral wealth beneath the North Slope, as evidenced by the direct reference to petroleum. President Warren Harding established the Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 4, now the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, all the way back in 1923. In 1944, the Navy began a large-scale exploration of the region, including numerous wells, to locate and estimate the oil and natural gas reservoirs. While no one, including the State Department diplomats, then knew the extent of the northern Alaska oil reserves, they were certainly aware that they were offering something of value for something of value.
As an aside, the report also claimed, “No criticism has been leveled at our treatment of the indigenous population of Alaska.” Again, no one went around asking Alaska Natives for their thoughts on any of this.
Alas for any Danish immigrants or descendants living in northern Alaska, the Point Barrow swap was deemed a non-starter. As the unnamed author(s) declared, this proposal “may also be discarded since the difficulties of negotiating an agreement of this type would be as great if not greater than those for cession of the island, while our military and related interests would better be served if we owned Greenland in its entirety.”
After its discussion on Alaska, the calculation of a monetary offer for Greenland is one of the report’s more fascinating passages. First, it described Denmark as a “weak state” due to its occupation during World War II. Second, there was the $25 million paid for the Danish West Indies. It concluded, “Assuming the potential defense value of Greenland to us is greater than that of the Danish West Indies in 1916, it is felt that $100,000,000 in gold would not be too large a price to offer.” Thus, by one old estimation, Greenland is worth four U.S. Virgin Islands.
On Dec. 14, 1946, Secretary of State James Byrnes made the $100 million offer to Danish Foreign Minister Gustav Rasmussen, who was initially flummoxed by the surprising bid. Byrnes optimistically reported, “Our needs … seemed to come as a shock to Rasmussen, but he did not reject my suggestions flatly and said that he would study a memorandum which I gave him.” Given time to recover, Rasmussen called the proposal “absurd” and told the American ambassador to Denmark that “while we owe much to America, I do not feel that we owe them the whole island of Greenland.” As the news spread about Denmark, opposition to an outright sale crossed all political divides.
Negotiations between the two countries from there focused on extending the existing military partnership. On April 27, 1951, a new Defense of Greenland pact was signed, allowing the American military presence in Greenland to expand, with “exclusive jurisdiction over those defense areas,” except over Danish nationals. Danish sovereignty over Greenland was again confirmed. The agreement was amended in 2004 to recognize Greenland’s increased autonomy via its Home Rule government.
Various officials — always American, never Danish — occasionally brought up the idea of buying Greenland. It was the sort of idea that came up in random meetings every few months or so. In 1959, the State Department’s Northern European Affairs officer William M. Kerrigan offered the most scathing indictment of such proposals. He wrote, “The final point as I recall was that any overt action in the direction of attempted purchase of Greenland could be extremely dangerous for the retention of our activities there, and could hardly improve our status, since we are permitted to do almost anything, literally, that we want to in Greenland.”
• • •
Key sources:
Dyer, Brainerd. “Robert T. Walker on Acquiring Greenland and Iceland.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review. 27, no. 2 (1940): 263-266.
Egan, Maurice Francis. Letter to Assistant Secretary of State. September 20, 1910.
“Greenland-Alaska Land Swap Is History.” Anchorage Times. May 3, 1991, A1, A14.
Hubbard, Charles J. “Should Greenland Be American?” Collier’s. November 10, 1945.
Jacobsen, Marc, and Sara Olsvig. “From Peary to Pompeo: The History of United States’ Securitizations of Greenland.” In Greenland in Arctic Security, edited by Marc Jacobsen, Ole Waever, and Ulrik Pram Gad. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024.
Kerrigan, William M. Memorandum to Robert M. Brandin. August 7, 1959, United States Department of State.
Peary, Robert E. “Greenland as an American Naval Base.” New York Times. September 11, 1916, 8.
Peirce, Benjamin Mills. A Report on the Resources of Iceland and Greenland. Washington, D.C.: United States State Department, 1868.
Kiffer, Dave. “Alaska for Greenland?” SitNews. August 20, 2019.
From our collaborating partner “Living on Earth,” public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by host Steve Curwood with Alannah Hurley, executive director of the United Tribes of Bristol Bay.
In 2001, a Canadian mining company proposed a massive gold and copper mine at the headwaters of Bristol Bay, a pristine water system on the coast of the Alaska Peninsula that’s home to the largest sockeye salmon run in the world. The salmon support a thriving ecosystem and are a cultural and economic lifeblood for native Alaskans, who have stewarded the land and water for thousands of years.
As the company moved ahead with plans to build the largest open-pit mine in North America, those Indigenous communities joined together to bring it to a halt. In 2023, they secured a rare “EPA veto” of the proposed Pebble Mine, and the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize for North America recognizes an Indigenous leader in this fight.
Alannah Hurley is the executive director of the United Tribes of Bristol Bay. Her Yup’ik name is Acaq, her great-grandmother’s name. She is the winner of the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize for North America. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
STEVE CURWOOD: Before we start talking about your work protecting Bristol Bay, paint us a picture of the bay. What makes this such a special place?
ALANNAH HURLEY: Bristol Bay is an extremely special place. It has all the different types of terrain in Alaska, in one place. Where I live, at the mouth of the Nushagak and Wood River, we have everything from tundra and wetlands to mountains, freshwater lakes, freshwater rivers, the muddy waters of Nushagak Bay, [and] the beautiful, crystal-clear ocean waters as you go west towards Togiak and Twin Hills. It’s really untouched, pristine beauty—all of Alaska’s majesty in one place. It’s so pristine you can still hunt and fish and pick berries and eat them straight from the land. You can drink right out of the lake and rivers. It’s paradise.
CURWOOD: Bristol Bay has huge environmental significance, but it’s also important to many human communities. I had been told that it produces more than $2 billion of annual revenue from sockeye salmon fishing alone, it’s also an important food source and cultural site for Indigenous communities, First Alaskans. Talk to me about what the bay means to the people in the area.
HURLEY: There are three different Indigenous groups in Bristol Bay—the Yup’ik people, the Dena’ina people, and the Alutiiq people. Our homeland has been stewarded by our people for thousands and thousands of years. They’ve taken care of this place and entrusted it to us. Our lands, our water, and everything that that entails—the salmon, the moose, the caribou, the bears, us, our freshwater fish, our berries, our plants, our medicines—we very much view it as all very connected. Anything that happens to our lands and waters happens to us. It is everything to us. It is the health of our people, physically, culturally, spiritually. It sustains us. It nourishes us. We’re so blessed to be able to live in the ways that our ancestors have lived. That kind of foundation is really critical in understanding our perspective and wanting to protect our home.
CURWOOD: In 2001, the Northern Dynasty Minerals mining company proposed the development of what’s called the Pebble Mine. It would have been the largest open-pit mine on the continent, one of the biggest, I guess, in the whole world. What would have been the environmental impact of such a project?
HURLEY: The environmental impact of the Pebble project would have been devastation. If you look at a map of Bristol Bay, there are two major river systems, the Nushagak and the Kvichak. The Pebble Mine would be located at the connected headwaters of both. You literally could not have picked a poorer location, and in my opinion, it’s [the] creator’s test to the people: What are you going to choose? But you could not have picked a worse location to put a low-grade acid-generating project that would have to store tens of billions of tons of toxic waste in perpetuity.
That picture is not a question of if something will happen, but when, especially in an earthquake-prone zone, and in a very hydrologically interconnected place. They’re like the veins of the bay—all of that water is connected. Our people, very early on, came out opposed to the project, because we knew that it would mean the utter devastation of our watershed, our fishery and our people.
CURWOOD: Some say that there are literally hundreds of billions of dollars worth of copper and gold and other minerals in the area for the Pebble Mine. Sounds like a lot of money, but you didn’t see this as good news for your community if this got developed.
HURLEY: No, we did not. Early on, before we learned about what type of ore it was, where it was located, what it would mean, what the tilings would mean, people were actually excited for some type of diversification of the economy. Fisheries can be pretty volatile, and that’s how a lot of people would survive in the cash economy as commercial fishermen.
But it did not take long to learn about those things, the dangers and the threat and the risk that that would cause to our people, and very early on, the vast majority of Bristol Bay’s people said, “No way, this is not worth the risk.” You cannot put a price tag on our water and what salmon mean to us as a people. This would be an existential threat to our ability to continue to be Indigenous people in this region, and we will not stop fighting until it is stopped.
CURWOOD: My understanding of Alaskan politics is that at the state level, there wasn’t a huge amount of pushback against this Pebble Mine proposal.
HURLEY: Our people’s concerns were really falling on deaf ears at the state level. We saw the state rewrite our area management plan illegally, without proper input or public process or consultation with our tribes. We saw the governor at the time try to pave the way for a mining district, and we’re still working to rectify some of those issues in that rewritten management plan to this day. And we’re still having issues with the state government pushing a project on Bristol Bay and Alaskans that they’ve proven for the last 20 years that they just do not support.
Because our concerns were falling on deaf ears at the state level, our tribal governments saw the federal government as the place to put some energy, and that was where the petition to the EPA came from, because the state was not listening. They were doing the exact opposite, to really grease the skids for the company to move forward.
CURWOOD: How did the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency respond?
HURLEY: The tribes petitioned in 2010 to prohibit all mines like Pebble within the Bristol Bay watershed. The EPA came back and said, “We’re not going to act on a prohibition immediately under our authority under the Clean Water Act, but we are going to study Bristol Bay. We want to do an assessment. And we want to ask, is this place really unique, and what does this fishery mean to the state and people? If this type of development, large-scale hard rock mining, were to move forward, what kind of impact could that have on the waters and people?”
They took three years to do a bunch of studies. They were in a lot of different communities. There was a lot of peer review to answer those questions, and after that very long, drawn-out assessment, they determined what our people had been saying all along: that this type of development would devastate the water and everyone who was sustained by that water, and so that was really the basis for their action that came later.
CURWOOD: At the end of the day, how did things turn out with the EPA?
HURLEY: It was a bit of a roller coaster between the different administrations, but it’s really a testament to the dedication of our people and our region that regardless of the administration, regardless of winning and losing court cases, they did not give up. And so the EPA, in January 2023, finalized protections to stop the project.
CURWOOD: What’s the risk that the Trump administration number two could reverse all of that?
HURLEY: There is very much still a risk that that could happen. The company,Northern Dynasty, the state of Alaska and a few others have challenged the EPA protections in court, which we anticipated they would.
So far, the Trump administration has continued to defend [the] EPA’s action in court, but that is ongoing litigation, and we’re not putting all of our eggs in that basket with how unpredictable this administration has been in other arenas. We’re definitely remaining extremely vigilant. And we’re continuing to defend the protections in court, and we also are working on legislation that would address the other 20 active mining claims throughout the watershed.
While we’ve made great progress, unfortunately, Pebble isn’t the only mining claim in the region, and so we’re working really hard to put this type of development to bed for good, so that our kids aren’t destined to fight project by project, now into eternity.
CURWOOD: As executive director of the United Tribes of Bristol Bay, how important would you say tribal cooperation has been during this fight?
HURLEY: Tribal unity and cooperation has been absolutely critical. I think in any instance where a coalition is working to protect a place, having Indigenous people leading and center of the effort is absolutely critical. Local people need to be at the forefront of these fights, and without that unity in the bay, there’s no way we would be where we’re at today.
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CURWOOD: You were involved in building that coalition, including Native Alaskans, but also other political constituencies, the commercial fisherpeople and such. What was it like to build a coalition like that?
HURLEY: In the case of United Tribes of Bristol Bay, it was really about centering and amplifying the tribal voice and holding the government accountable for government-to-government consultation. There was real unity in that.
I think anytime you’re building a coalition, it can be challenging. I mean, it’s hard to get five people to agree to where you’re going to go to dinner, let alone 15 tribal governments from different cultural backgrounds who historically didn’t always get along, coming together to fight a common enemy for our continued existence as Indigenous people. That threat really brought us all together in ways that we had never seen before, and that also translated out to non-native groups, commercial fishermen, the conservation community. These aren’t people who usually get along. We’re used to fighting over fish, not working together to protect them, and so anytime you bring different groups together, there’s going to be bumps in the road.
At the end of the day, the connections between people, the relationships and the commitment to work [got us] through hard moments—and there were a lot of hard moments. A commitment, especially by non-native folks, to be in a respectful relationship with native people and us having that requirement that if we are going to be partners, this is how we expect to engage, helped lay the groundwork for a successful coalition. That’s never easy, it’s never pretty, but it was really the people-to-people relationships, those connections, that held us together even in the hard times.
CURWOOD: You’ve spoken about your grandmother’s influence and the values that propelled you through this journey. What lessons have you learned that have motivated you to keep going?
HURLEY: My grandmother was Mancuaq; I was raised with her in Clark’s Point in Bristol Bay. And it’s hard for me not to get emotional talking about her, because even now, even in all the different experiences in my life, everything important, the most important things that have helped me navigate life in a way that has been good and, you know, really grounded in love and respect and kindness came from her. Also the ability to persevere when things are tough. She passed away in 2019.
I obviously still miss her a lot. She provided me with the foundation of values, of how to move forward and live in this world in a good way. Our people have had those teachings for centuries—timeless, timeless teachings of what it means to be a good, real human being on the planet. And that foundation has helped me in life in invaluable and countless ways, and it continues to do so every day.
CURWOOD: What do you see for the future of Bristol Bay?
HURLEY: The future of Bristol Bay is beautiful. We are still struggling with the impacts of colonization, but we have only begun our healing, our reclamation, our revitalization of who we are as Indigenous people.
We have been so lucky that even through all of those challenges, our people have been able to remember and retain and still pass on our values and way of life. I feel like the potential to be a model of sustainability for the world led by Indigenous communities in modern society is boundless, and I’m really excited and hopeful that our region can shift from having to put our energy in defense of our homelands, to now help build something beautiful and tackle some of the tough issues that we’re facing.
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We are reviving Curious Alaska, a popular feature launched by the Anchorage Daily News in 2021.
The idea is simple: You have questions. Our reporters find answers. We share them with readers.
Maybe you’re curious about a landmark (like the Parks Highway Igloo, pictured below), or a tradition, a news event or a public figure from the past. Maybe you have a practical question about everyday life in Alaska.
On our initial run, we tackled more than 30 topics that readers inquired about.
Some examples of reader questions we’ve looked into so far include why we don’t have a Trader Joe’s here, whether there are snakes in Alaska, why sand dunes exist in Kincaid Park and the story behind cattle herds on remote islands in the state.
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- A megatsunami is an incredibly large wave of about 100 meters (328 ft) or more. These huge waves are often triggered by events such as landslides.
- In August 2025, a megatsunami in Alaska happened when a landslide entered a fjord next to South Sawyer Glacier. The event generated a wave 1,580 feet (481 meters) high.
- Scientists believe a warning system could help alert any people in the area. It would be based on seismic activity in the area.
By Michael E. West, University of Alaska Fairbanks and Ezgi Karasözen, University of Alaska Fairbanks
2025 Alaska megatsunami shows need for warning system
On the evening of August 9, 2025, passengers on the Hanse Explorer yacht finished taking selfies and videos of Alaska’s South Sawyer Glacier, and the ship headed back down the fjord. Twelve hours later, a landslide from the adjacent mountain unexpectedly collapsed into the fjord, initiating the second-highest tsunami in recorded history.
We conduct research on earthquakes and tsunamis at the Alaska Earthquake Center. And one of us serves as Alaska state seismologist. In a new study with colleagues, we detail how that landslide sent water and debris 1,580 feet (481 meters) up the other side of the fjord. That’s higher than the top floor of the Taipei 101 skyscraper. And then the tsunami continued down Tracy Arm. The force of the water stripped the fjord’s walls down to bare rock.
The 2025 Alaska megatsunami
It was just after 5 o’clock in the morning on a dreary day. And fortunately, no ships were nearby. In the months after, some cruise lines started avoiding Tracy Arm. However, the conditions that led to this event are not at all unique to this fjord.
Landslides are common in the coastal mountains of Alaska. In these areas, rapid uplift – caused by tectonic forces and long-term ice loss – converges with the erosive forces of precipitation and moving glaciers. But a curious pattern has emerged in recent years: Multiple major landslides have occurred precisely at the terminus (end point) of a retreating glacier.
Though the mechanics are still poorly understood, these mountains appear to become unstable when the ice disappears. When the landslide hits the water, the momentum of millions of tons of rock is transferred into tsunami waves.
This same phenomenon is playing out from Alaska to Greenland and Norway, sometimes with deadly consequences. Across the Arctic, countries are trying to come to terms with this growing hazard. The options are not attractive: avoid vast swaths of coastline, or live with a poorly understood risk. We believe there is an obvious role for alert systems. But only if scientists have a better understanding of where and when landslides are likely to occur.
Signs that a landslide might be coming
The Tracy Arm landslide is a powerful example.
The landslide occurred in August, when warm ocean waters and heavier precipitation favor both glacier retreat and slope failure. The glacier below the landslide area had experienced rapid calving: large chunks of ice breaking off and falling into the water. And it had retreated more than a third of a mile in the two months prior. Heavy rain had been falling. Rain enters fractures in the mountain and pushes them closer to failure by increasing the water pressure in cracks.
Most provocative are the thousands of small seismic tremors that emanated from the area of the slide in the days prior to the mountainside collapsing.
We believe that this combination of signs would have been sufficient to issue progressive alerts to any ships in the vicinity and homes and businesses that could have been harmed by a tsunami at least a day prior to the failure … had a monitoring program existed.
Escalating alerts are used for everything from terrorism and nuclear plant safety to avalanches and volcanic unrest. They don’t remove the risk. But they do make it easier for people to safely coexist with hazards.
For example, though people are still killed in avalanches, alert systems have played an essential role in making winter backcountry travel safer for more people. The collapse at Tracy Arm demonstrates what could be possible for landslides.
What an alert system could look like
We believe that the combination of weather and rapid glacier retreat in early August 2025 was likely sufficient to issue an alert notifying people that the hazard may be temporarily elevated in a general area. On a yellow-orange-red scale, this would be a yellow alert.
In the hours prior to the landslide, the exponential increase in seismic events and telltale transition to what is known as seismic tremor – a continuous “hum” of seismic energy – were sufficient to communicate a time-sensitive warning for a specific region.
These observations, recorded as a byproduct of regional earthquake monitoring, warranted an “orange” alert noting immediate concern. The signs were arguably sufficient to recommend keeping boats and ships out of the fjord.
Alerts are possible
Our research over the past few years has demonstrated that once a large landslide has started, it is possible to detect and measure the event within a couple of minutes. In this amount of time, seismic waves in the surrounding area can indicate the rough size of the landslide and whether it occurred near open water.
A monitoring program that could quickly communicate this would be able to issue a red alert, signaling an event in progress.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s tsunami warning program has spent decades fine-tuning rapid message dissemination. A warning system would have offered little help for ships in the immediate vicinity, but it could have provided perhaps 10 minutes of warning for those who rode out the harrowing tsunami farther away.
There is no landslide monitoring system operating yet at this scale in the U.S. Building one will require cooperation across state and federal agencies, and strengthened monitoring and communication networks. Even then, it will not be fail-proof.
Understanding risk, not removing it
Alert systems do not remove the risk entirely, but they are a better option than no warning at all. Over time, they also build awareness as communities and visitors get used to thinking about these hazards.
Many of the most alluring places on Earth come with significant hazards. Arctic fjords are among them. The same processes that create this hazard – glacier retreat, steep terrain, dynamic geology – are also what make these landscapes so compelling. The mix of glaciers, ice-choked waters and steep mountains is exactly what draws people to these places. People will continue to visit and experience them.
The question is not whether these places should be avoided altogether, but how to help people make more informed decisions. We believe that stronger geophysical and meteorological monitoring, coupled with new research and communication channels, is the first step.
On August 9, visitors unknowingly passed through a landscape on the cusp of failure. An alert system might have given tour companies and people in the area the information they needed to make more informed choices and avoid being caught by surprise.
Michael E. West, Director of the Alaska Earthquake Center and State Seismologist, University of Alaska Fairbanks and Ezgi Karasözen, Research Seismologist, Alaska Earthquake Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Bottom line: A 2025 Alaska megatsunami sent a 1,580-foot wave of water up the Tracy Arm fjord. It revealed the need for a landslide-triggered tsunami warning system.
Read more: Landslide-triggered tsunamis becoming more common
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