AlaskaGeography.com

Alaska Geography Photographs

The following links lead to some photographs portraying Alaskan geography.  These images were scanned from slides, so the quality is not as good as it could be, but it is good enough to provide understanding of how Alaskan geography looks in reality. To see a map showing the locations of these photos by image number, click here: Photo Locations Map

Image Number	Image Name	Size in KB	Description
1	anch_cumulus.jpg	155	A large cumulus storm cloud rises over other cumulus clouds above Anchorage and Knik Arm. A particularly warm pocket of heated air has risen to an elevation where it reaches its dew point. At this elevation, the air cools and forms a cloud as it looses its moisture. The act of turning water from a gas into liquid releases heat, warming the cloud even more, causing it to rise up above all the other clouds, where it cools even further, releasing more moisture. This process continues until all the water vapor has been converted to liquid, most of it falling as rain.
2	canada_cirque.jpg	107	A large hill in the bottom of the photo had several cirques carved into it during the last glaciation. Somewhere over Alberta, most likely.
3	canada_esker.jpg	98	Sand dunes, drumlins (egg shaped hills) and an esker (splitting the lake) somewhere over northern Manitoba or Nunavut. Glaciers and glacial streams left these formations during the most recent ice age, which ended about 12,000 years ago.
4	conglomerate.jpg	195	A large conglomerate boulder carried out of the Talkeetna Mountains and deposited along Moose Creek, about 10 miles east of Palmer. This rock was problably formed in an ancient river bed or delta that was buried under other sediment, lithified uplifted in the Talkeetna Mountains and later eroded.
5	copper_river.jpg	161	Enormous U-shaped glacial valley now inhabited by the Copper River. Many cirques, tarns and hanging valleys can be seen in the surrounding Chugach Mountains.
6	denali_tectonics.jpg	167	Uplifted block consisting of uplifted sediments on top of uplifted sediments. Just south of Denali National Park on the Parks Highway. Bonus if you can figure out exactly how this formation came to be.
7	east_chugach_glacier.jpg	271	An unidentified glacier in the eastern Chugach Mountains with a medial moraine flowing down the length of it.
8	erratic.jpg	197	Large glacial erratic on top of a moraine in the upper Susitna Valley near the Tokositna River.
9	folds.jpg	228	Folded schist in the Peters Hills, south of Denali National Park on the Petersville Road.
10	grewingk_outwash.jpg	282	Grewingk Glacier outwash plain. A glacier retreating at a constant rate deposited this flat plain of glacial till. The glacier blends with the cloudy sky behind me.
11	homer_fossil.jpg	201	Fossilized leaf along the Homer beach. Probably 30-40 million years old.
12	homer_beach.jpg	436	Sandstone on top of a layer of coal on top of more sandstone on the Homer Beach.
13	homer_shrooms.jpg	126	Sandstone hoodoos (yardangs,goblins) revealed at low tide along the homer beach. Softer sediment lay underneath more solid rock, allowing these to form as the ocean eroded the softer rock away. The harder rock protected some of the sediments beneath.
14	homer_spit.jpg	187	The Homer Spit – a submerged glacial moraine added to by littoral drift.
15	interior_storm.jpg	129	A serious cumulonimbus cloud forms in the summer heat of the interior. Near the Chena River east of Fairbanks. See the description of anch_cumulus.jpg for a scientific explanation.
16	matanuska.jpg	219	Hills of glacial sediment opposite the Matanuska River, a braided river of glacial origin. The river forms a crude border between the Chugach Terrane, of which the Chugach Mountains opposite the river are part of, and the Peninsular Terrane, of which the Talkeetna mountains behind me are part.
17	mckinley.jpg	193	View of Mt. McKinley from the confluence of the Susitna and Talkeetna Rivers.
18	plucked_hill.jpg	268	The distinctive shape of this hill indicates that it was smoothed on one side and plucked on the other by the Knik Glacier, which is out of the photo to the right. In the Knik River valley near Palmer. This kind of hill is officially known as a rouche mountanee.
19	portage.jpg	186	Ruined house and drowned trees that were doomed by the 1964 Earthquake, which sunk the land around Portage about 4 feet, putting it in the tidal zone.
20	reed_cirque.jpg	228	Tarn that fills a cirque at the back of Reed Valley in the Talkeetna Mountains. The Talkeetna mountains themselves are made of igneous granite that was intruded into the crust and later exposed at the surface by the formation of these mountains.
21	taiga.jpg	308	A typical taiga scene in the South Fork of Eagle River.
22	tanada.jpg	193	Tanada Peak in the Wrangell Mountains. It is the remnant of an old shield volcano, half of which has been eroded away, allowing us to view a cross section of the crater.
23	tokositna.jpg	216	A meandering river, the Tokositna River in the fall. As this river meandered across the valley, it created channels that were later blocked by sediments, forming sloughs and lakes, several of which can be seen in this photo. Upper Susitna Valley.
24	mudvolcano.jpg	167	A mud volcano at Tolsona, 10 miles west of Glennallen. Superheated water rises up through the glacial lake sediments that underlie the surface here. The hot water carries clay and silt particles that were deposited on the ancient lakebed back up to the surface, forming low hills devoid of vegetation.
25	tors.jpg	229	Granite intrusions into the more ancient schists of these hills are revealed as the more easily erodable schist is removed, leaving the harder granite thumbs behind.
26	turnagain_fog.jpg	242	Fog over Turnagain arm in winter. Warmer air from Prince William Sound has flowed over the mountains and comes into contact with the cold water, creating a fog.
27	williwaw_hangval.jpg	269	View overlooking a hanging valley and its tarn-filled cirque that feeds into Williwaw Valley in the Chugach Mountains east of Anchorage.
28	woronzof_seds.jpg	321	Ancient river sediments deposited at Point Woronzof in Anchorage. The larger cobbles were deposited in times of flooding. The black blob is an ancient piece of wood revealed as the ocean slowly erodes the bluff away.
29	wrangell.jpg	222	A view of Mt. Wrangell, a shield volcano in the Wrangell Mountains.
30	yukon.jpg	204	The Yukon River, a large meandering river, from the air. The Yukon starts in Canada and cuts across the entire state of Alaska, entering the Bering Sea at the enormous Yukon-Kuskokwim delta in western Alaska.
31	beach_terrace.jpg	140	The remains of ancient eroded beach cliffs can be seen along the coast below. The have been uplifted above the tidal level. More cliffs are most likely being formed along the current coastline. Glacial cirques can also be observed in the photo. Probably on Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska.
32	fiords_cirques.jpg	159	Post-glacial cirques and fiords can be observed in this photo over what is probably Prince of Wales Island. Smoothed bedrock at the lower elevetions is in marked contrast to the jagged peaks at higher elevations, which were not covered by glaciers.
33	eagle_river.jpg	142	A good example of a medium sized meadering river in Alaska is Eagle River, 10 miles northeast of Anchorage. It slowly deposits and erodes back and forth across a relatively flat valley that has been filled with glacial till. Cut bank and point bar locations can be observed, as well as bends that have recently been cut through and oxbow lakes.
34	mt_edgecumbe.jpg	84	Mt. Edgecumbe, located near Sitka, is the only volcano in Southeast Alaska. It is a stratovolcano with a clear cone shape and large crater at the top. The flat area surrounding it is the remnants of ancient lava flows.

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Permission is granted to use these materials for academic or personal use.  Any other use will be granted only by written permission of the photographer (David Snyder).