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Alaska

Google Streetview: Fairbanks?

Messing with Google Maps Streetview tonight, I checked to see if Omaha, NE had been added to the list of Streetview Cities. Disappointed to find that it hadn’t, I decided to head toward Alaska, but forgot to turn Streetview off. Well, lo and behold Streetview in Anchorage, Juneau, and Fairbanks. Juneau had been there for a while, but I really was surprised to see Fairbanks. Now I can soothe my homesickness with this lovely view:


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3 replies on “Google Streetview: Fairbanks?”

I have been searching for an African tribe who got no future tense in their language and I clicked on your web-site with a hope to find an info. though what I have found was about New Guine and your experiences there….they were quite astonishing!As your proses amazed me I decided to explore your space entirely and came to this spot about Alaska. The scenery looked to me so plain and peacefull. I just wonder why Alaskans prefer to construct bungalow-like structures? As far as I know as a land mass Alaska is not a techtonically active region. If you may provide an answer for my question I will be so pleased!
Betul (from Turkey)

Betul, thank you for such an interesting comment. The building in that image is my old apartment in Fairbanks. Many buildings in houses in Fairbanks tend to be very low, partly because they were built very quickly during boom times in the city, so they weren’t well-constructed. “Bungalow-like” can describe many houses in Alaska, indeed. Often, in that region, houses slowly sink into the ground due to permafrost – frozen ground that often melts when a structure is built on it. And FYI, Alaska is very tectonically active, with the Pacific Plate being subducted under the North American plate. There are dozens of active volcanoes along the Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands, and Alaska experiences regular earthquakes, including a magnitude 7.9 just six years ago which destroyed many roads, and of course the great 1964 earthquake which registered M9.2 and killed over 100 people. Since so few people live in Alaska, the effect of these large quakes is much, much less than it would be in another active place like Turkey.

What sort of research are you doing on African languages? I have a degree in Linguistics and am very interested in world languages.

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