What do you get when 100 million cubic meters (3.5 billion cubic feet) of land suddenly plunge into an icy Alaskan fjord? Some big-ass waves, it turns out – including one that was taller than all but one of the highest buildings in New York City. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

That’s what happened back on August 10 this year, when a massive landslide occurred in Tracy Arm – a fjord about 130 kilometers (80 miles) south of Alaska’s state capital, Juneau – at around 5:30 am local time. Massive isn’t an overstatement, either.

“I feel pretty comfortable saying that anything that was actually at the terminus of this glacier, right at the base of this landslide, would have been absolutely obliterated,” state seismologist

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