The Alaska Range is a relatively narrow, 600-mile-long (950 km) mountain range in the southcentral region of the U.S. state of Alaska, from Lake Clark at its southwest end to the White River in Canada's Yukon Territory in the southeast. Denali, the highest mountain in North America, is in the Alaska Range. The range is part of the American Cordillera.
In geology, a proglacial lake is a lake formed either by the damming action of a moraine during the retreat of a melting glacier, a glacial ice dam, or by meltwater trapped against an ice sheet due to isostatic depression of the crust around the ice. At the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago, large proglacial lakes were a widespread feature in the northern hemisphere.
The Saint Elias Mountains are a subgroup of the Pacific Coast Ranges, located in southeastern Alaska in the United States, Southwestern Yukon and the very far northwestern part of British Columbia in Canada. The range spans Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in the United States and Kluane National Park and Reserve in Canada and includes all of Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska. In Alaska, the range includes parts of the city/borough of Yakutat and the Hoonah-Angoon and Valdez-Cordova census areas.
Mount Lucania in Yukon is the third-highest mountain in Canada, and the second-highest mountain located entirely within the country. A long ridge connects Mount Lucania with Mount Steele, the fifth-highest in Canada. Lucania was named by the Duke of Abruzzi, as he stood on the summit of Mount Saint Elias on July 31, 1897, having just completed the first ascent. Seeing Lucania in the far distance, beyond Mount Logan, he immediately named it "after the ship on which the expedition had sailed from Liverpool to New York," the RMS Lucania.
Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve is an American national park and preserve managed by the National Park Service in south central Alaska. The park and preserve were established in 1980 by the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. The protected areas are included in an International Biosphere Reserve and are part of the Kluane/Wrangell–St. Elias/Glacier Bay/Tatshenshini-Alsek UNESCO World Heritage Site. The park and preserve form the largest area managed by the National Park Service with a total of 13,175,799.07 acres, an expanse larger than nine U.S. states and around the same size as Bosnia and Herzegovina or Croatia. 8,323,147.59 acres are designated as the national park and the remaining 4,852,652.14 acres are designated as the preserve. The area designated as the national park alone is larger than the 47 smallest American national parks combined and is more than twice the size of all but two other national parks. Its area makes up over 15% of all national park designated land in the United States.
William Healey Dall was an American naturalist, a prominent malacologist, and one of the earliest scientific explorers of interior Alaska. He described many mollusks of the Pacific Northwest of America, and was for many years America's preeminent authority on living and fossil mollusks.
The Harriman Alaska expedition explored the coast of Alaska for two months from Seattle to Alaska and Siberia and back again in 1899. It was organized by wealthy railroad magnate Edward Harriman. Harriman brought with him an elite community of scientists, artists, photographers, and naturalists to explore and document the Alaskan coast.
Glacier Bay Basin in southeastern Alaska, in the United States, encompasses the Glacier Bay and surrounding mountains and glaciers, which was first proclaimed a U.S. National Monument on February 25, 1925, and which was later, on December 2, 1980, enlarged and designated as the Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, covering an area of 3,283,000 acres. In 1986, UNESCO declared an area of 57,000 acres within a World Biosphere Reserve. This is the largest UNESCO protected biosphere in the world. In 1992, UNESCO included this area as a part of a World Heritage site, extending over an area of 24,300,000-acre (98,000 km2) which also included the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Kluane National Park (Canada) and Tatshenshini-Alsek Park (Canada). Part of the National Park is also designated a Wilderness area covering 2,658,000 acres.
The Malaspina Glacier in southeastern Alaska is the largest piedmont glacier in the world. Situated at the head of the Alaska Panhandle, it is about 65 km (40 mi) wide and 45 km (28 mi) long, with an area of some 3,900 km2 (1,500 sq mi), approximately the same size as the state of Rhode Island.
An ice field is a mass of interconnected valley glaciers on a mountain mass with protruding rock ridges or summits. They are often found in the colder climates and higher altitudes of the world where there is sufficient precipitation for them to form. The higher peaks of the underlying mountain rock that protrude through the icefields are known as nunataks. Ice fields are larger than alpine glaciers, but smaller than ice caps and ice sheets. The topography of ice fields is determined by the shape of the surrounding landforms, while ice caps have their own forms overriding underlying shapes.
Bering Glacier is a glacier in the U.S. state of Alaska. It currently terminates in Vitus Lake south of Alaska's Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, about 10 km (6.2 mi) from the Gulf of Alaska. Combined with the Bagley Icefield, where the snow that feeds the glacier accumulates, the Bering is the largest glacier in North America. The glacier is named after Vitus Bering.
MV Malaspina, colloquially known as the Mal, is a mainline ROPAX ferry and the original Malaspina-class vessel for the Alaska Marine Highway System. Malaspina is named after the Malaspina Glacier, which, in turn, is named after Captain Don Alessandro Malaspina, an Italian navigator and explorer who explored the northwest coast of North America in 1791. Malaspina is nearly identical to her sister ship, MV Matanuska.
Mount Augusta, also designated Boundary Peak 183, is a high peak in the state of Alaska.
Henry Bradford Washburn Jr. was an American explorer, mountaineer, photographer, and cartographer. He established the Boston Museum of Science, served as its director from 1939–1980, and from 1985 until his death served as its Honorary Director. Bradford married Barbara Polk in 1940, they honeymooned in Alaska making the first ascent of Mount Bertha together.
During the Age of Exploration, the Spanish Empire undertook several expeditions to the Pacific Northwest of North America. Spanish claims to the region date to the papal bull of 1493, and the Treaty of Tordesillas signed in 1494. In 1513, this claim was reinforced by Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa, the first European to sight the Pacific Ocean, when he claimed all lands adjoining this ocean for the Spanish Crown. Spain only started to colonize the claimed territory north of present-day Mexico in the 18th century, when it settled the northern coast of Las Californias.
Kluane / Wrangell–St. Elias / Glacier Bay / Tatshenshini-Alsek is an international park system located in Canada and the United States, at the border of Yukon, Alaska and British Columbia.
Mount Seattle is a 10,350-foot (3,150 m) peak in the Saint Elias Mountains of Alaska in the United States. It was named for the city of Seattle, home of the "camp hands" of a 19th-century National Geographic Society–United States Geological Survey scientific expedition to the Hubbard Glacier and Mount Saint Elias. It is called the "most prominent Alaskan coastal peak" and blocks sight of larger inland peaks, even Mount Logan nearly twice its height.
The Agassiz Glacier is located near the west coast of New Zealand's South Island. The Agassiz Glacier is a tributary of the larger Franz Josef Glacier, and is itself fed by the Chamberlin Snowfield and the Davis Snowfield. It is named after Louis Agassiz, a Swiss-American glaciologist, and was discovered and named by the German geologist, Sir Johann "Julius" von Haast.
The 1979 Saint Elias earthquake occurred near noon local time on the 28th of February. It measured Mw 7.4–7.6. Though the maximum recorded Modified Mercalli intensity was VII, damage was minimal and there were no casualties due to the remoteness of the faulting. The epicenter lies near the Alaskan border between America and Canada.
Tyndall Glacier is a valley/tidewater glacier in the U.S. state of Alaska. The glacier lies immediately west of 141° West longitude, within the boundaries of the Wrangell–Saint Elias Wilderness, itself part of Wrangell–St. Elias National Park & Preserve, in the borough of Yakutat, Alaska.
