Prince William Sound
| Prince William Sound Prince William Sound |
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 Prince William Sound at low tide |
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| Waters | Gulf of Alaska ( Pacific Ocean ) | |
| Land mass | North America | |
| Geographical location | 60 ° 35 ′ 13 ″ N , 147 ° 1 ′ 9 ″ W | |
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 Prince William Sound south of Alaska |
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The Prince William Sound ( English Prince William Sound ) is a bay in the Gulf of Alaska with almost 5000 km of coastline, east of the Kenai Peninsula .
In the east, north and west it is framed by the Chugach Mountains . Montague Island stretches 80 km between the bay and the open sea . The largest port in the Sound is Valdez , the southern terminus of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline . Other places on the sound are Cordova in the east and Whittier in the west. The up to 80 m high ice front of the Columbia Glacier , the largest adjacent ice field, flows into the bay in the north over a length of 10 km.
George Vancouver gave the sound its name in 1778 after Prince William Henry, Duke of Clarence, later King William IV .
Disasters
On March 27, 1964, the so-called Good Friday quake claimed 131 lives and caused damage of $ 500 million. The quake, with a magnitude of 9.2 and a duration of four minutes, was the strongest in the United States to date. The towns of Valdez and Chenega were almost completely destroyed by the tsunami that followed the quake , as were the ports of Valdez and Cordova.
On March 24, 1989, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef after leaving the port of Valdez, causing a major environmental disaster in the Sound. 40,000 tons of crude oil contaminated 2,000 km of coastline and killed hundreds of thousands of fish, sea birds and other animals. The traces of the accident are no longer visible today, but the flora and fauna have still not fully recovered.
literature
- Penny Rennick: Prince William Sound . Alaska Geographic Society, 1993, ISBN 1-56661-008-7 .
- Jim Lethcoe, Nancy Lethcoe: A History of Prince William Sound, Alaska . Prince William Sound Books, 1994, ISBN 1-877900-04-4 .
