Anchorage

Along the route to Matanuska Glacier (click for full size).

A large city in Alaska, almost as large as my home town of Minneapolis.  This was the end of our Alaska tour and we spent it visiting downtown attractions and making an excursion to Matanuska Glacier, 100 miles northeast.

We also saw the “bore tide” come in to Turnagain Arm.  A bore tide is a phenomenon of the interaction between coastal topology and the diurnal tide swell.  Shortly after low tide, as the moon’s influence begins pushing the ocean’s waters up again, if the rise exceeds the flow capacity of a channel, a hydraulic wavefront is created.  In some conditions that wave can become quite high and we saw surfers riding it for miles as it propagated down Turnagain Arm. See the video below.


The bore tide arrives at Turnagain Arm. Watch for it to develop secondary wavelets called “whelps”.

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