All About Alaska
Alaska is a constituent state of the United States of America. It lies at the extreme northwest of the North American continent and is the largest peninsula in the Western Hemisphere. Its 591,004 square miles (1,530,700 square km) include some 15,000 square miles (38,800 square km) of fjords and inlets, and its three faces to the sea have about 34,000 miles (54,400 km) of indented tidal coastline and 6,600 total miles (10,600 km) of coast fronting the open sea. Alaska borders the Arctic Ocean on the north and northwest, the Bering Strait and the Bering Sea on the west, and the Pacific Ocean and Gulf of Alaska on the south. The land boundaries on the east cut across some 1,150 miles (1,850 km) of high mountains to separate the state from the Canadian Yukon Territory and British Columbia province. Rimming the state on the south is one of the Earth's most active earthquake belts. In the Alaska Range north of Anchorage, Mount McKinley (Denali), at 20,320 feet (6,194 metres), is the highest peak in North America. The capital is Juneau, which lies in the southeast in the panhandle region.
When it became the 49th state on January 3, 1959, Alaska increased the nation's size by nearly 20 percent. The new area included vast stretches of unexplored land and untapped resources. At the time Secretary of State William H. Seward negotiated its purchase from Russia in 1867, however, Alaska was known as Seward's Folly. Its settlement and exploitation have been hindered by its distance from the rest of the nation and by geographic and climatic impediments to travel and communications; Alaska continues to be the country's last frontier. More than half of the state's inhabitants live in the Greater Anchorage area.
The question of development versus preservation has been heightened by commercial and ecological uses of land: the Alaska Highway gas-pipeline project, native Alaskans' land claims, noncommercial whaling by native peoples, and related matters. The conflicts between conservationists and petroleum companies over the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which runs from the oil-rich North Slope on the Arctic Ocean to Valdez in the south, was a continuation of the century-long effort to find a balance between conservation and development in this enormous land.
The immense area of Alaska has a great variety of physical characteristics. Nearly one-third of the state lies within the Arctic Circle and has perennially frozen ground (permafrost) and treeless tundra. The southern coast and the panhandle at sea level are fully temperate regions. In these latter and in the adjoining Canadian areas, however, lies the world's largest expanse of glacial ice outside Greenland and Antarctica. Off the extreme western end of the Seward Peninsula, Little Diomede Island, part of Alaska, lies in the Bering Strait only 2.5 miles (4 km) from Russian-owned Big Diomede Island; both countries have shown a tacit tolerance of unintentional airspace violations, which are common in bad weather.
The Alaskan economy is conditioned strongly by the state's frontier stage of development, but its formerly inadequate tax base for state and municipal growth ended with the development of the North Slope oil fields. High costs of labour and transportation and complicated environmental and land-use constraints still tend to discourage outside investment. Nonetheless, development of the state's natural resources has assisted markedly in the transition from a federal military to a commercial self-supporting economic base. The first wave of immigration from the ''South 48'' - which occurred in the decade before World War I as an aftermath of the gold rush - was a response to Alaska's initial concentration on its mineral, fish, and timber resources. The discovery of oil fields and the emergence of Alaska as an international air crossroads added impetus to the influx of the 1940s and '50s and construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline to that of the 1960s and '70s. By 1980 only about 20 percent of the white population of the state was born in Alaska.
Alaska has had an upsurge of tourism. Travelers arrive mainly by air or sea and can now cover large areas by airplane and road. The influx is partly the result of the 500-passenger, 100-car ferries that operate as the Alaska Marine Highway. One ferry system connects Kodiak with mainland Seward and the Alaska Railroad, another links Cordova and Valdez, and a third serves panhandle communities from Ketchikan to Skagway, with service also from Prince Rupert, British Columbia, and Seattle, Wash. The sporting industry, including guide and outfitter services and boat charters, continues to be a colourful activity. In 1980, more than 104 million acres were designated for national parks, preserves, wildlife refuges, and wilderness areas, adding to the 7.5 million already so established. The Alaskan national parks are notably spectacular. Denali (formerly Mount McKinley) National Park and Preserve (1917) has an abundance of wildlife, including brown and grizzly bears, caribou, and moose. Katmai National Park and Preserve (1918), on the Alaska Peninsula, includes the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, an area of active volcanoes that in 1912 produced one of the world's most violent eruptions. Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve (1925) has magnificent fjords, as well as glaciers that have retreated extensively in the 20th century. Sitka National Historic Park (1910), with a large totem pole collection, commemorates the stand of the Tlingit against early Russian settlers. The Tongass and Chugach national forests in the southeast and south central regions, respectively, are also federal public land reserves.
High costs of transportation continue to sap Alaska's economic development, largely because the major transportation links, both internal and external, are by air, which provides the fastest way to cross Alaska's great distances and formidable terrain. Two dozen airlines serve Alaska, with daily service for passengers and cargo from the South 48 and Canada, Europe, Hawaii, Korea, and Japan. Some 800 airfields, seaplane bases, and emergency strips are in use, and few villages are without service at least by bush pilots. Most of the state's roads are surfaced. The Alaska Highway and its Haines and Skagway cutoffs connect Alaska's internal road network to the outside and provide relatively easy access for tourists. A 416-mile (669-km) haul road from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay connects with the existing highway system to provide an overland route from the ice-free southern ports to the Arctic Ocean. The public, however, is restricted to the southern half of this highway and may use it only in the summer. Ocean vessels also run during the ice-free midsummer months to Nome and Barrow and to the oil regions of the Arctic coast.
