Physiography of the southern ranges
The Alaska and Aleutian ranges—together with the Talkeetna, Chugach, and Wrangell mountains, the interior part of the St. Elias Mountains, and the Boundary Ranges of southeastern Alaska and flanking interior sectors of northwestern British Columbia—constitute the most massive and spectacular mountain system in North America. Much of this system is geologically analogous in some respects to the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Range of the western United States, and physiographically it may be considered the northwestern continuation of these.
The Alaska and Aleutian ranges extend in a great belt from the Canadian border, at first northwestward and then south- and westward to the Aleutian Islands. The oceanic Aleutians comprise a chain of mountainous volcanic peaks, the crest of a huge submarine ridge 1,500 miles long and 20 to 60 miles wide that rises 11,000 feet above the seafloor. Separating the Bering Sea from the Pacific Ocean, the archipelago stretches in a 1,100-mile-long arc from the Alaska Peninsula to Attu Island at the western end of the chain. With the Aleutian Range on the southeast side of the peninsula, they form a long, narrow belt of storm-whipped, often fog-shrouded peaks for 1,600 miles from Attu to Mount Spurr just west of the city of Anchorage. More than 80 volcanoes have been mapped in this chain, half of which have been active in the last 300 years. Marine sedimentary rocks and granitic intrusions from the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras, as well as Cenozoic volcanic rocks, form this range. Pavlof and Shishaldin volcanoes rival Japan’s Mount Fuji in the beauty of their symmetrical cones. There are enormous calderas—collapsed craters marking past volcanic eruptions. In 1912 one of the most spectacular of recent historic eruptions occurred when a volcano in the Aleutian Range erupted, forming the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, in what is now Katmai National Park and Preserve. Mount Spurr erupted in 1954 and remains active, as do Mounts Redoubt (1968) and Augustine (1976).
The Alaska Range merges on its western end with the Aleutian Range between Iliamna Lake and Mount Spurr and extends in a great arc some 600 miles to the Canadian border at the southeastern end. This great mountain wall is about 120 miles wide near Mount Spurr and about 60 miles wide in the vicinity of Mount McKinley, gradually narrowing to about 30 miles near the Canadian border. The range is extremely rugged and glaciated. The crest of most of the range averages between 7,000 and 9,000 feet in elevation, with a number of peaks exceeding 10,000 feet. The heavily glaciated massif of Mount McKinley (known to Native Americans as Denali, meaning “The High One”), at 20,320 feet (6,194 metres), is the highest point in North America; a spectacular companion peak is Mount Foraker (17,400 feet). Four great individual mountain masses dominate the Alaska group, divided by a number of low passes and river valleys, several of which provide routes of travel across the mountains. Great valley glaciers radiate from these mountain masses, except in the relatively low eastern sectors, where the few glaciers are small. The Alaska Range is the drainage divide for rivers flowing north into the Yukon system and those flowing south into the Gulf of Alaska.
Most of the Alaska Range is underlain by large granitic intrusions (batholiths) into Paleozoic and Mesozoic sedimentary rocks that have been metamorphosed and deformed. The youngest sedimentary sequences are of Cenozoic age, are only moderately deformed, and can contain large deposits of coal. Long valleys and low passes follow the course of geologic faults, some extending almost parallel to the entire length of the range. The faults are thought to have formed near the close of the Mesozoic Era.
Between the Alaska Range and the coastal ranges lie the Talkeetna Mountains and, to the east of them, the Wrangell Mountains. The Talkeetnas occupy a rugged oval area about 100 miles from north to south and 70 miles from east to west. They consist of a compact group of radial ridges averaging from 6,000 to 8,800 feet in elevation. There are only a few low passes. The higher ridges are sharp-crested, but on the western flank, as elevation decreases, the ridge tops have been rounded and subdued by overriding glaciers during the Pleistocene Epoch (about 2,600,000 to 11,700 years ago). Small glaciers 5 to 15 miles long are still present at the heads of many valleys in the Talkeetnas. The bedrock consists of a granite batholith intruded during the Mesozoic. Paleozoic and Mesozoic sediments and volcanics are exposed on the flanks of the highlands. Some Cenozoic volcanic flows are present in the southeastern part.
The Wrangell Mountains, covering an area 100 by 70 miles, lie near the Pacific between the Alaska Range to the north and the Chugach Mountains to the south. The high, glaciated massifs rise more than 10,000 feet above the Copper River basin. Extensive local ice caps cover most of the highest mountains and feed large valley glaciers. This oval-shaped range consists of composite volcanic mountains that rest on metamorphosed Paleozoic and Mesozoic sedimentary and igneous rocks. Some granitic masses intrude the Mesozoic rocks. Several peaks are at elevations higher than 12,000 feet; the highest is Mount Bona, at 16,421 feet, while Mount Wrangell (14,163 feet) is still steaming. The Wrangells are some of the most visually striking of the Alaskan mountains because of their rugged topography and perennial snow cover.
Encircling the Gulf of Alaska, from Kodiak Island in the west to Baranof Island in the southeast, is another arcuate (bow-shaped) mountainous belt, 800 miles long and 20 to 110 miles wide. Mountainous Kodiak Island and the Kenai and Chugach mountains form a rugged barrier along the northeast margin of the Pacific Ocean. The mountains of the Kodiak Island group, at average elevations of 2,000 to 4,000 feet, trend southwest-northeast. Pleistocene glaciation over most of the island produced a highly irregular coastline.
The average elevation of the Kenai Mountains is 3,000 to 5,000 feet, whereas the Chugach group to the north and east average 7,000 to 8,000 feet. The highest peaks are in the sharp bend of the arc, where Mount Marcus Baker rises to 13,176 feet. The mountains are extremely rugged and heavily glaciated, resulting in the Sargent and Harding ice fields in the Kenai Mountains (on the Kenai Peninsula) and the Bagley Ice Field in the eastern Chugach Mountains. Numerous long and spectacular glaciers descend from the crests of these mountains. The St. Elias Mountains and the Kenai-Chugach mountain system have the most extensive system of highland and valley glaciers in North America, consisting of the Chugach and St. Elias ice fields.
The arcuate physiographic form of the Kodiak-Kenai-Chugach belt is closely paralleled by the structural trends of the underlying rocks. The Mesozoic lithologies, primarily marine sediments and volcanics, have been intensely metamorphosed, folded, and faulted and have been intruded by small to moderate-size igneous bodies. Along the coastal areas on Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska, softer Cenozoic marine sediments are well exposed.
The St. Elias Mountains straddle the border between Alaska and Canada. The Alaskan part of the range is topographically continuous with, and geologically similar to, the Chugach Mountains and joins the southeastern panhandle to the rest of the state. The St. Elias chain, composed of many glacier-fed ranges, is one of the highest coastal mountain groups in the world. It is about 200 miles long and has a maximum width of about 100 miles. The chain merges with the Chugach group near the Alaska-Yukon border and with the Wrangells and parts of the Alaska Range to the northwest.
The massive, blocklike St. Elias Mountains rise from a myriad of narrow ridges and spectacular peaks at 8,000–10,000 feet (2,400–3,000 metres) in elevation to numerous ice-armoured summits over 14,000 feet high. Mounts Logan (19,524 feet) and St. Elias (18,008 feet) are the two highest peaks. The spectacular St. Elias chain contains the largest ice field in North America, with about half of its glacial cover of some 10,000 square miles in Canada and the rest in Alaska. The average elevation of the ice fields blanketing the lower regions is 3,000 to 7,000 feet. Because of difficulty of access and extensive ice cover, the geology is still little known. The highest mountains are fault-block in character and consist of uplifted metamorphic granite cores with huge inclusions of migmatite, gneiss, and schist. On the coast and inland flanks, the geology grades into sedimentary and admixed volcanic rocks of Paleozoic and Mesozoic age.
At the southern end of the St. Elias Mountains, on a peninsula south of the Alsek River where it enters Dry Bay, rises the unique and spectacular fault-block mountain system of the Fairweather Range. Its ice-clad summit, only nine miles from the sea, is Mount Fairweather (15,300 feet). At the southern end of this range is the Brady Icefield, and east of the range is world-renowned Glacier Bay, with its largely receding tidal glaciers. The Chilkat Range, east of Glacier Bay, is flanked by Lynn Canal, the northern extension of Chatham Strait. Together they represent one of the longest and deepest fjords in North America.
Along the north-south axis of this fjord is the trace of a great, inactive fault system known as the Lynn Canal–Chatham Strait trough. This fault zone bounds the St. Elias Mountains on the northwest and west and continues to the north and west along the north side of the Alaska Range; it continues southeastward through the Alexander Archipelago and thence offshore along the coast of southeastern Alaska and western British Columbia. West of the St. Elias Mountains and Fairweather Range is the still-active Fairweather Fault, a northward extension of California’s coastal San Andreas Fault. The Fairweather Fault parallels the southeastern Alaska coast from Cape Spencer north and northwestward to the Copper River and Cook Inlet of south-coastal Alaska. This fault system has been the locus of many major earthquakes in Alaska since the 1850s, including the large quake of March 1964.
The mountains of southeastern Alaska tie in the Canadian Coast Mountains to the south and east with the St. Elias range to the north and west. As such, they are a northward continuation of the Pacific mountain system that extends southward into the western United States. The heavily glaciated Boundary Ranges along the Alaska-Canada border extend between the Skagway River at the northern end of Alaska’s Inside Passage southward to the Portland Canal southeast of Ketchikan. They rise to 5,000 to 7,000 feet above sea level, with the higher peaks reaching 10,000 feet. These mountains are underlain by the massive granitic rocks of the Coast Range Batholith, successively intruded in various stages during the orogeny of the late Mesozoic to early Cenozoic (about 100 to 50 million years ago). To the northeast and southeast of Juneau, respectively, are the Juneau and Stikine ice fields that feed numerous valley glaciers, some of which extend to the sea.
A unique and distinguishing characteristic of the Boundary Ranges are the inclusion of accretionary terranes—massive zones of exotic rock types rafted into positions that now are some distance inland and are found even on the interior Canadian flanks of the Juneau and Stikine ice fields. These large and distinctive rock types represent pre-Cenozoic blocks shifted northward along the trace of ancient island arcs along the coast, actuated by tectonic stresses along plate boundaries.
Lying to the west of the Boundary Ranges on the mainland is the rugged and scenic island complex of the Alexander Archipelago. The mountains of the archipelago range in elevation from 2,000–3,500 feet in the southern Prince of Wales Mountains to more than 4,000–7,500 feet in the Chilkat Range and the mountains of Admiralty, Baranof, and Chicagof islands. These islands have small glaciers and rugged coastlines indented by fjords. The archipelago is composed of southeast–northwest-trending belts of Paleozoic and Mesozoic sedimentary, metasedimentary, and volcanic rocks. Metamorphic facies rocks are exposed in the eastern sectors. These have been intruded by igneous stocks and cut by many high-angled normal and reversed faults.