Almost a week before a 7.0 earthquake shook Alaska’s urban core to the tune of tens of millions of dollars in damage, lit up social media, and caught the attention of the national press, Jenny found her way home thanks to the internet.
She was among the many pets social media in various forms – Nextdoor, Facebook, Twitter – helps reunite with their owners every day in the Anchorage metro area. She was unusual only in that she was a donkey.
Not many Anchorage residents lose a donkey. Her disappearance was rare enough that a friend of owner Forrest Boehmler posted her disappearance in this way on Nextdoor: “Lost donkey ( no joke).”
That she was found several houses away from Boehmler’s Hillside residence would, he later observed, illustrate the “something positive” of the connectivity that social media has delivered to a vast segment of American society today.
Only days later that connectivity would be on display in a massive way as Southcentral Alaska shook and Alaskans turned immediately to the tubes to check on friends and loved ones, assess damage, find pets that fled in panic during the earthquake, and simply communicate with each other en masse.
So many of them were online that the internet sometimes slowed to a crawl, but it kept running.
The advisory came, predictably enough, over the internet via email and Nixle, the online business that bills itself as the “open communication forum that connects public safety, municipalities, schools, businesses and the communities they serve.”
But email and Nixle were far from the only place on the internet government was communicating.
“The Mayor, Anchorage Police Chief Justin Doll and Anchorage Fire Department Chief Jodie Hettrick will be giving a 4:30 p.m. update on all aspects of earthquake operations, damage and what residents currently need to know,” APD reported. “It will be broadcast live on our FB page.”
Much of the world now recognizes the FB acronym for Facebook, and almost as soon as the shaking stopped in Alaska, people were turning to that website to find out what happened.
A million monkeys
Aristotle, of course, could not have imagined the smart phone with a built-in camera that presents an instantly framed photo on a screen and requires almost no skill on the part of the user to capture a halfway decent photo – just point and shoot.
Imagine what an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of smartphones could do, and then consider what an infinite number of humans, even the dumbest of whom are smarter than a monkey, did do with this technology.
If you wanted the “visual news” of the earthquake, it was up and evolving by the minute on Facebook and Instagram as soon as the shaking stopped. You could see why the Seward Highway south out of Anchorage was stalled.
Visual news
The Seward Highway south of Anchorage/Elissa Marie McAlpine on Facebook
You could see why it was hard to get to the Anchorage International Airport going northbound off Anchorage’s Minnesota Drive.
Minnesota Boulevard and International Airport Road/Greg Johnson on Facebook
You could see the problems north of Anchorage on the Glenn Highway.
Glenn Highway at Mirror Lake exit/Greg Johnson on Facebook
And there was much, much more you could see coming in on an information stream provided by hundreds if not thousands of average Alaskans and a handful of government agencies.
The University of Alaska Fairbanks Alaska Earthquake Center provided an excellent, real-time, online map of where from the earthquake and the dozens of aftershocks were originating.
For some in the Anchorage area, Facebook friends became for the day boots-on-the-ground reporters compiling their own photographic coverage of the quake and aggregating the coverage of others, as did Greg Johnson an Anchorage commercial pilot.
Once this sort of reporting was the forte of the traditional media. Breaking news has long been the bread-and-butter of local journalism across the country.
But the Anchorage shake of ’18 revealed all too well how much the battleground for news has been shaken by social media.
Changing “news”
News has gone realtime and visual and that has given almost everyone the potential to be a reporter. The rise of this phenomenon portends big questions as to whether and in what form professional news gathering is to survive.
Its future would appear to hinge on bringing explanation to the chaos, but the traditional media is, by and large, poorly equipped to do that at this time. Many of the reporters working in Anchorage today don’t know the geography of the area let along the geology.
The Alexander – actually Alexander Creek, not river – is a tributary to the Susitna River on the Alaska mainland significantly to the north of the Kenai Peninsula.
Most Alaska fishermen know this. When local media make such errors and then leave them uncorrected for weeks as if no one in the entire news organization noticed, the knowledge base of a whole bunch of the traditional media becomes suspect.
And in a world where the weaknesses of once trusted sources of news are regularly exposed, it should come as no surprise that social media – especially visual social media – has become a new, go-to source for news, especially breaking news.
The problem is – as has been much discussed – that social media is also a prime breeding ground for “fake news” intentional or accidental.As a result, social media requires readers to do some serious weighing.
But, with that said, some of the best “reporting” of what was actually going on with the physics of the earthquake was on Facebook where geophysicist Peter Haeussler from Anchorage was keeping up a steady stream of posts, which included links to a solid, Tremblor.net explanation of the “exotic” earth movements that caused a “tensional quake in a compressional setting” wherein experts admitted to the”best explanation that we can come up with” plus a link to a very cool simulation of how the shocks radiated out from the epicenter as linked below.
In the information age, there are clear downsides to social media. It can spread disinformation and misinformation just as easily as accurate inforation.
But as Jenny and the earthquake illustrate, there are some pretty big upsides too. Maybe it’s time someone postulate an infinite social medium theorem.
What might it produce?
Categories: News
It said on nextdoor that this donkey’s tether failed. If that is true, then the donkey’s owner is an ass. This is bear country. Livestock should be kept in bear-resistant paddocks. Not roped to a pole. That’s bear baiting with live bait. Stupid. If you can’t offer your pets safety, then you shouldn’t own them.
So it looks like the epicenter was right in the heart of Point Mackenzie?
When was the last time a gas well was fracked over there?
Probably NOT a good location for a future LNG terminal and large diameter Gasline?
https://www.matsugov.us/news/gasline-project-ordered-to-evaluate-port-mac
Hey Steve,
If you go by that logic, there isn’t a safe place left to build anything. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for any LNG stuff there, I’m just saying that the entire southern coast of Alaska is able to have large quakes. I’m a believer in science… and engineering. Can’t we design our infrastructure to withstand a 9.0 quake a little better. Along with tsunami’s. Or devastating forest fires. Or bear attacks.
I might be taking this a step too far…
Cheers man!
PS – speaking of everyone being a reporter – what’s the lower valley looking like from your perspective? Stores, gas stations, homes, etc. Is this a good time to invest in an insurance company? ;>)
Jack,
I have not gone south since the shake up, but I do know that the school in Big Lake took a big hit as did the 3 bears store there.
The day after the quake, I heard quite a few fires in Wasilla on the scanner and wonder if any had to do with breaks in the NG lines?
Our home held tight, and I am glad we paid for additional concrete and rebar in the foundation.
I guess the 5,000 nails a day we used in framing also paid off.
As for our state’s future in investments…I think tommorow is bound to look a lot like today.
Especially as commissioners have decided to not alert the public to fracking projects in our area.
https://inletkeeper.org/2018/02/19/what-the-frack-state-protects-oil-corporations-hides-fracking-info-from-alaskans/
Good to hear your home held up, Steve.
Thanks Bill,
I just found an interesting fact that the HAARP in Gakona was advertising a “Research Campaign” on their website, then took down the posting today?
Luckily, folks have screen shots and are posting them on Twitter.
The UAF site said:
“The next research campaign is scheduled for Nov. 29 to Dec. 3, 2018”
Which means it was operating when the earthquake occured?
https://mobile.twitter.com/uafhaarp/status/1068212994729889792
I hope you aren’t suggesting that HAARP had something to do with earthquake, Steve.
I remember a Begich was concerned about it about 25 years ago-“Angels Don’t Play This Haarp.”
Bill,
Maybe Craig can interview Nick Begich and do a story on Ionosphere Heaters?
Ours is the most powerful in the world, but Norway, and Russia have them as well.
“The HAARP beam is broad like a flashlight’s, not narrow like a laser’s, but it can be electronically steered anywhere within 30° of zenith—that is, local vertical—and it can operate at 3–10 MHz. Its powerful radio wavesdrive ionospheric electrons back and forth in what are calledplasma waves. As those driven electrons collide with each other and with background species, their temperature goes up, which is why HAARP is called a heater.”
Question is: Why are we heating the Ionosphere if monthly temps are way above recorded averages?
This seems like weird science to me.
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/PT.3.3032
So Steve, are you saying fracking is responsible for the 40,000 earthquakes Alaska has each year? Maybe fracking is responsible for the Ring of Fire as well? Steve, I think you need to travel in a different circle my friend. Because those “Greenie” loons are just nuts.
Bryan,
Science has proven that hydraulic fracking CAN cause earthquakes…
Obviously not all quakes are caused by this methodology.
“Although fracturing-related earthquakes are chronic, they were thought to be minor. But new research is showing that they can be quite large and damaging. The focus of the study, a 5.7 magnitude quake near Prague, Oklahoma, damaged 14 homes and other structures in the area.”
https://earthworks.org/issues/fracking_earthquakes/
SS – It’s not fracking that causes quakes. Rather, it is the disposal of fracking fluids via injection into the ground after a frack job is complete. This was first discovered in Denver in 1961 when Rocky Mountain Arsenal disposed of fluids in a 12,000′ well (2 miles, this is important) and reactivated the Front Range fault under Denver. The fluids lubricated the fault and things started moving. When they stopped pumping, the quakes stopped. Knowing this, the industry is moving toward recycling fracking fluids.
Friday’s quake was 25 – 27 miles deep, far beyond our ability to drill. Southcentral AK sits on a web of major fault lines due to the Pacific Plate delivering chunks of land into and underneath Alaska. It is that motion that causes the earthquakes. And the oilies have absolutely nothing to do with the motion of a plate or the collision of it into North America. Take a close look at the geology around here. it is fascinating. Cheers –
agimarc, is that number of yours (25-27 miles deep) and update to initial number of 19 miles deep same day as quake?