Alaska Science Forum

This article is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Larry Gedney is a seismologist at the Institute.

Most Alaskans can reel off a string of facts and figures about Alaska and the Arctic designed to impress the newcomer, but which can become stale after too much repetition. Just about everybody knows by now the awesome dimensions of the state, the fact that it has more miles of coastline than all the others combined, that it is both the furthest east (Attu Island) and furthest west state, and that it lies only two miles from Russia--the distance between Alaska's Little Diomede Island in the Bering Strait and Siberia's Big Diomede Island.

The distinguished scientist and author, Isaac Asimov, includes in his Book of Facts (Bell Publishing Company, 1981) some other particulars bearing on the state and its environs which are probably not as well known. These include:

1. At their peak, Alaskan oil wells in the Prudhoe Bay field produced 10,000 barrels per day, as contrasted with about 11 per day from a typical well in the lower forty-eight.
2. A sure way to strike it rich during the Klondike gold rush was to sell groceries. Entrepreneurs charged $16 a gallon for milk, $3 a dozen for eggs, $3 a pound for butter, and $1.50 each for onions. This was at a time when a good meal in San Francisco cost $0.25.
3. When Alaska and Hawaii became the forty-ninth and fiftieth states, their principal cities became the two most expensive cities in the nation in which a family could live "comfortably." According to the U.S. Department of Labor in 1978, it cost the average family $24,029 a year to live in Anchorage and $20,883 in Honolulu. Obviously, the rates have increased dramatically since that time.
4. The U.S. benefited greatly from the fact that Russia considered Great Britain as an enemy during the time of the Alaskan purchase. Britain had won the Crimean War against the Russians and sided with the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War. Had it not been for these differences, Alaska would have logically gone to Great Britain, whose dominions in Canada bordered the land on the east.
5. Russian propaganda assisted measurably to the sale of Alaska. At the time, the House of Representatives was more interested in punishing President Andrew Jackson than in buying Alaska, and American public opinion was not enthusiastic about territorial expansion. The Russians negotiated the sale with the aid of some $100,000 in the sales pitch, much of it under-the-table.
6. In his famous "Checkers" speech, Richard Nixon (as Vice-Presidential candidate in 1952) wasn't the only chief executive to defend his pet dog. During World War II in 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt, in confronting critics who accused him of dispatching an American destroyer to Alaska to pick up his pet Scottie, Fala, replied that he was used to hearing malicious falsehoods about himself, but that he had the right to resent libelous statements about his dog.
7. During recent years, Los Angeles has laid claim to being the nation's largest city in terms of area. That is not correct. Tiny Juneau has held that distinction since 1970 when it merged with Douglas, which is situated on an island across the Gastineau Channel. A total of 3,108 square miles now lie within the city limits.
8. The University of Alaska system stretches from the community college in Ketchikan to a tiny "learning center" on remote Adak in the Aleutian Islands. These two points are as distant from each other as London and Moscow.
9. Because of flattening of the earth near the poles, the bottom of the Arctic Ocean--depths of 2.8 miles have been recorded--is closer to the center of the earth than the bottom of the world's deepest trench, Mindanao in the Phillipines. The Mindanao trench penetrates 6.8 miles below sea level, but the sea level at that latitude is almost 13 miles above the polar sea level.