Prince William Sound

Prince William Sound at low tide

The Prince William Sound south of Alaska

The Prince William Sound (English Prince William Sound ) is a bay of the Gulf of Alaska with nearly 5,000 km of coastline, east of the Kenai Peninsula.

In the east, north and west it is surrounded by the Chugach Mountains. Between the bay and the open sea extends to 80 km in length, the island Montague Iceland. The largest port in the Sound is Valdez, the southern terminus of the Trans-Alaska pipeline. Other places on the Sound are in the East Cordova and Whittier in the West. The up to 80 m high ice front of Columbia Glacier, the largest contiguous ice field, leads to a length of 10 km in the north in the bay.

George Vancouver gave the Sound 1778 Prince William Henry, Duke of Clarence, later King William IV, his name.

Disasters

On March 27, 1964, the so-called Good Friday earthquake called 131 lives and caused damage amounting to $ 500 million. The quake with a magnitude of 9.2 and a duration of four minutes was the strongest to date in the United States. The towns of Valdez and Chenega were caused by the tsunami following the earthquake almost completely destroyed, as are the ports of Valdez and Cordova.

On 24 March 1989, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran at Bligh Reef aground after he had left the port of Valdez, which triggered a major environmental disaster in the Sound from. 40,000 tons of crude oil contaminated 2000 km coast and killed hundreds of thousands of fish, sea birds and other animals. The traces of the accident are not to be seen today, flora and fauna, however, have still not fully recovered.