• 4 min read Landslide and Avalanche Debris Litter Hubbard Glacier Satellite-based radar images show where a powerful earthquake in the Yukon, Canada, sent rock, snow, and ice spilling across the frozen landscapes of the St. • NASA Earth Observatory NISAR Earthquakes Glaciers & Ice Sheets Landslides On December 6, 2025, a powerfulmagnitude 7.0 earthquakestruck the remote St. • Elias Mountains, a highly glaciated range that spans the Yukon-Alaska border. • The quake shook the landscape beneath Hubbard Glacier, sending ice and rock careening down the range’s steep slopes. • TheNISAR(NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite offered some of the earliest views of the changed landscape. • Geophysicist Eric Fielding and colleagues at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) typically use satellite data tomap the displacementof the ground after major earthquakes strike land.

Article Summaries:

  • A magnitude‑7.0 earthquake struck the St. Elias Mountains on 6 Dec 2025, triggering widespread landslides and avalanches that dumped rock, snow and debris onto Hubbard Glacier. NASA‑ISRO’s NISAR satellite captured the change two days later, showing bright, rough‑surface patches where the ice was covered in debris-features absent in a pre‑quake image. Preliminary USGS analysis identified more than 700 slide events, especially northwest of the epicenter. The glacier’s rapid seaward flow, now reaching up to 6 000 m yr⁻¹, is carrying the debris toward the ocean, raising new hazards for mountaineers and expeditions in the uninhabited region.
  • On December 6, 2025, a powerful magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the remote St. Elias Mountains, a highly glaciated range that spans the Yukon-Alaska border. The quake shook the landscape beneath Hubbard Glacier, sending ice and rock careening down the range’s steep slopes. The NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite offered some of the earliest views of the changed landscape. Geophysicist Eric Fielding and colleagues at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) typically use satellite data to map the displacement of the ground after major earthquakes strike land. But in this region,

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