Alaska’s Pacific arm stays ice-free yet breeds storms
The Gulf of Alaska—Tlingit Yéil T'ooch’—curves from Kabuch Point and Kodiak Island east to Cape Spencer, where Glacier Bay opens the Inside Passage. Warmed by the Kuroshio via the North Pacific Current, it never freezes over, yet it spawns storms that bury southern Alaska in snow and soak coasts as far as California.
Its shore mixes forest, mountains and glaciers that end in the sea. Alaska’s two biggest ice sheets, the Malaspina and the Bering, spread right down to the coast. Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound are the largest inlets cutting into it, alongside Yakutat Bay. Lituya Bay, a fjord below Mount Fairweather, is where the largest tsunami ever documented struck. Definitions of the gulf vary: hydrographers draw its southern edge from Cape Spencer to Kabuch Point, taking in every nearby island, while the US Geological Survey’s names database runs the line from Kodiak Island’s southern tip to Dixon Entrance.
Satellite colour readings from SeaWiFS rank these waters as a Class I ecosystem, fixing upwards of 300 grams of carbon on each square metre annually. Deep down live corals such as Primnoa pacifica, usually between 150 and 900 metres, and their presence helped win parts of the seabed protection as Habitat Areas of Particular Concern.
In 1977 the gulf’s climate flipped without warning. Surface water grew warmer on average and commercial fish became more plentiful and varied, a change nobody could explain at the time and one echoed across other North Pacific seas that decade. The gulf is also a prolific storm factory. Its systems pile up some of the heaviest snow and ice anywhere south of the Arctic Circle along southern Alaska, and many then track down the coasts of British Columbia, Washington and Oregon, reaching Southern California mainly in El Niño years. Much of the seasonal rain and snow of the Pacific Northwest and the American Southwest starts out here.
Source: Gulf of Alaska
