Why Almost Nobody Lives on Alaska's West Coast

Alaska's western shore is longer than California, Oregon and Washington combined, yet only about 50,000 people live along it, and just three towns pass 3,000 residents. It isn't the cold: a sea too shallow for harbors, a delta the size of England and a missing road stack on top of each other, and now the sea itself is coming inland. 0:00 Intro 0:31 The 1925 Serum Run 1:09 Where Alaskans Actually Live 3:04 A Sea Too Shallow 5:15 The Delta Problem 7:43 No Road to Anchorage 10:11 Ice and Ancient Beringia 12:20 Booms That Built No Cities 16:17 When the Sea Comes Inland 21:46 What Comes Next Sources: U.S. Census Bureau – Alaska population change 2010–2020 – https://www.census.gov/library/stories/sta... KYUK – Y-K Delta population grew about 9% – https://www.kyuk.org/post/y-k-delta-popula... Wikipedia – 1925 serum run to Nome – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1925_serum_r... NOAA – Bering Sea shelf geology and oceanography – https://library.oarcloud.noaa.gov/noaa_doc... Terenzi, Jorgenson & Ely 2014 – Storm-surge flooding on the Yukon–Kuskokwim Delta – https://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arcti... Alaska DGGS – Permafrost – https://dggs.alaska.gov/hsg/permafrost.html Alaska Legislature – DOT&PF aviation (82% of communities off the road system) – https://www.akleg.gov/pdf/30/M/HTRA2018-04... Alaska Public Media – Hooper Bay gas at $8.44 – https://alaskapublic.org/news/economy/2026... NASA Earth Observatory – Historic low sea ice in the Bering Sea – https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-obser... NOAA NESDIS – Remnants of Typhoon Halong caused record flooding – https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news/tracked-n... GAO-09-551 – Alaska Native villages threatened by flooding and erosion – https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-09-551 ADF&G – Bristol Bay 2022 salmon season summary – https://adfg.alaska.gov/static/application... Map imagery: Sentinel-2 cloudless 2016 by EOX IT Services GmbH (contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016), CC BY 4.0 · Terrain: AWS Terrain Tiles · Vector data: Natural Earth. Photos: Satellite: NASA Worldview / GIBS, MODIS Terra and VIIRS · Flickr – USFWS Headquarters, mypubliclands, *~Dawn~*, Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, ChrisL_AK, The National Guard, Arian Zwegers, Western Arctic National Parklands (CC BY 2.0), Umnak (CC BY-SA 2.0), USFWSAlaska, Alaska National Guard (public domain) · Pexels – Sergei Starostin, Yaroslav Shuraev, Tom Fisk, Abdel Achkouk, Serg Alesenko, Sergey Guk, Carl-Emil Jørgensen, Marc Espejo, Wolfgang Weiser, Horace Young, Borja Lopez, Zetong Li, Vitaliy Todo, marshall krasser, EJ Merl, Casey Whalen, Sururi Ballıdağ, Dmitry Samsonov, Ameer Hamza, Stephen Pierce, Jakub Zerdzicki, iVes Winzy, Pok Rie, ulrich Keutchatang, EVENT.MEDIA AHA, Efrem Efre, Eren Ataselim, Owen Casey, Elements Interactive, K, Marko Zoric, Seven Seil, SALAR · Pixabay – j7126, brigachtal, Solarselle77, Joe_hackney, Hans, Vimeo-Free-Videos. A few reconstruction shots (the Bering shelf cut-away, Nome's 1900 landing, thawing permafrost, the Beringia land bridge, a storm surge on the tundra) are AI-generated illustrations. #geography #alaska #documentary