Prince William Sound
The Sound was named in 1778 to honour the third son of King George III.
Prince William Sound encompasses 3,800 miles of coastline, bounded to the east and north by the Chugach Mountains and to the west by the Kenai Peninsula. Commercially important for the fishing and oil industries, the sound is also prized for its abundance of marine and coastal life, its rain forest of Sitka spruce and western hemlock, and its glacier-studded landscape. The sound contains 150 glaciers including 17 tidewater glaciers, known for dramatically calving huge ice chunks into the sea. Prince William Sound has more active tidewater glaciers than anywhere else in the world.
The area was devastated in 1964 by a massive earthquake, which unleashed a tsunami that affected coastal areas along the Gulf of Alaska, on the west coast of Canada and the United States, and in Hawaii; it also damaged or destroyed much of downtown Anchorage. Prince William Sound was also the site of a massive oil spill on March 24, 1989, when an Exxon Corporation tanker, the Exxon Valdez, ran aground on Bligh Reef. Delayed efforts to contain the spill and naturally strong winds and waves dispersed some 10.9 million gallons of North Slope crude oil across the sound. The spill eventually polluted thousands of miles of indented shoreline, as well as adjacent waters, as far south as the southern end of Shelikof Strait between Kodiak Island and the Alaska Peninsula. An intensive effort was subsequently mounted to clean up the oil spill and restore the sound’s damaged ecosystem
Prince William Sound
The Sound was named in 1778 to honour the third son of King George III.
Prince William Sound encompasses 3,800 miles of coastline, bounded to the east and north by the Chugach Mountains and to the west by the Kenai Peninsula. Commercially important for the fishing and oil industries, the sound is also prized for its abundance of marine and coastal life, its rain forest of Sitka spruce and western hemlock, and its glacier-studded landscape. The sound contains 150 glaciers including 17 tidewater glaciers, known for dramatically calving huge ice chunks into the sea. Prince William Sound has more active tidewater glaciers than anywhere else in the world.
The area was devastated in 1964 by a massive earthquake, which unleashed a tsunami that affected coastal areas along the Gulf of Alaska, on the west coast of Canada and the United States, and in Hawaii; it also damaged or destroyed much of downtown Anchorage. Prince William Sound was also the site of a massive oil spill on March 24, 1989, when an Exxon Corporation tanker, the Exxon Valdez, ran aground on Bligh Reef. Delayed efforts to contain the spill and naturally strong winds and waves dispersed some 10.9 million gallons of North Slope crude oil across the sound. The spill eventually polluted thousands of miles of indented shoreline, as well as adjacent waters, as far south as the southern end of Shelikof Strait between Kodiak Island and the Alaska Peninsula. An intensive effort was subsequently mounted to clean up the oil spill and restore the sound’s damaged ecosystem