An earthquake and an aftershock that followed Sunday were the two largest recorded temblors to rock Alaska’s North Slope, according to quake experts.

A magnitude 6.4 earthquake shook the ground at 6:58 a.m. Sunday on the northern side the Brooks Range, the mountains that run west to east from northern Alaska to Yukon Territory. The epicenter was 343 miles (551 kilometers) northeast of Fairbanks.

The previous most powerful recorded quake, going back “many decades,” was a magnitude 5.2 quake in 1995, state seismologist Michael West said. Sixty times more energy was released Sunday, West said.

Six hours later after the main quake, seismometers recorded a magnitude 6.0 quake, West said. It was one of a few dozen aftershocks measured at magnitude 4.0 or greater in the 24 hours after the initial shallow, strike-slip quake, which occur when blocks in a vertical fault line move horizontally.

“We often see vigorous aftershocks in that kind of quake. But it is prodigious, without question,” West said.

The big aftershock was about 6 miles (10 kilometers) away and possibly on the same fault line.

“We expect to have that in the next couple of days,” West said. “That’s where the aftershocks are tremendously valuable. The aftershocks paint in the fault line.”

The timing of the event was fortuitous. Alaska is hosting USArray, part of the National Science Foundation’s EarthScope experiment, a 15-year program to place a dense network of permanent and portable seismographs across the nation. About 260 seismographs were planned for Alaska.

The goal is an explanation of how continents formed and where dangerous earthquakes may occur in the future.

“They were a complete and utter game-changer in this event,” West said. “Of the dozen closest seismic stations, 10 of them were part of this temporary USArray project.”

A remaining question is whether the quake ripped open the surface.

“We are hopeful within the next few days that we will have satellite images that might tell us something about whether it ruptured the surface, and exactly where,” West said.

Alaska’s North Slope is the source for most oil extracted and exported from the state. The quake was 85 miles (137 kilometers) southeast of Deadhorse, where workers fly in for work at oil fields.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Alaska Earthquake Center on Sunday fielded questions about whether the quake was a result of “induced seismicity.” West said that was unlikely.

Tectonic plates

Alaska averages 40,000 earthquakes per year, with more large quakes than the other 49 states put together. The state is at the convergence of two great tectonic plates, with the Pacific Plate slowly being pushed under the North America Plate.

As the Pacific Plate moves north, Alaska essentially is getting squished, West said. The compression is at the heart of its seismic activity — even a large quake in the northeast part of the state.

“Everything about it is consistent with what we might expect from Basic Plate Tectonics 101,” West said.

No damage was detected in oil fields or on the trans-Alaska pipeline. The pipeline was engineered for earthquakes and survived unscathed in a far larger temblor, the magnitude 7.9 quake of November 2002 on the Denali Fault, which passes under the pipeline.

The quake Sunday was south of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain, which Congress opened to drilling last year as part of a tax bill advocated by President Donald Trump.

The seismic activity Sunday would not be a roadblock to petroleum development, West said.

“We live all around the world with seismic hazards, and frankly, northern Alaska — we know very well it’s not a high hazard zone,” he said. “It’s no Anchorage. It’s no Japan. And no one should be using this earthquake to liken it to a place like that.”
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Former presidential adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman is drawing fire from President Donald Trump’s allies and national security experts for secret recordings she made at the White House, including her firing by chief of staff John Kelly in the high-security Situation Room.

Manigault Newman said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that she surreptitiously recorded a number of conversations in the White House for her own protection. Parts of her conversation with Kelly were played on the air. Critics denounced the recordings as a serious breach of ethics and security.

 

“Who in their right mind thinks it’s appropriate to secretly record the White House chief of staff in the Situation Room?” tweeted Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.

 

In the recording, which Manigault Newman quotes extensively in her new book, “Unhinged,” Kelly can be heard saying that he wants to talk with Manigault Newman about leaving the White House. The Associated Press independently listened to the recording of the conversation.

 

“It’s come to my attention over the last few months that there’s been some pretty, in my opinion, significant integrity issues related to you,” Kelly is heard saying, citing her use of government vehicles and “money issues and other things” that he compares to offenses that could lead to a court martial in the military.

 

“If we make this a friendly departure… you can look at your time here in the White House as a year of service to the nation and then you can go on without any type of difficulty in the future relative to your reputation,” he tells Manigault Newman, adding: “There are some serious legal issues that have been violated and you’re open to some legal action that we hope, we think, we can control.”

Manigault Newman said she viewed the conversation as a “threat” and defended her decision to covertly record it and other White House conversations.

 

“If I didn’t have these recordings, no one in America would believe me,” she said.

 

The response from the White House was stinging. “The very idea a staff member would sneak a recording device into the White House Situation Room, shows a blatant disregard for our national security — and then to brag about it on national television further proves the lack of character and integrity of this disgruntled former White House employee,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement.

 

The Situation Room is a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, where the nation’s most consequential foreign policy decisions are made, and staff are not permitted to bring in cellphones or other recording devices.

 

“I’ve never heard of a more serious breach of protocol,” said Ned Price, who served as spokesman of the National Security Council in the Obama administration. “Not only is it not typical, something like this is unprecedented.”

 

Price said there is no one checking staffers for devices at the door, but there is a sign outside the room making clear that electronic devices are prohibited.

 

“The Situation Room is the inner-most sanctum of a secure campus,” he said, describing the breach as part of a culture of disregarding security protocols in the Trump White House. He also questioned why Kelly would ever choose to have such a meeting there.

 

In the book, which will be released Tuesday, Manigault Newman paints a damning picture of Trump, including claiming without evidence that tapes exist of him using the N-word as he filmed his “The Apprentice” reality series, on which she co-starred.

 

Manigault Newman wrote in the book that she had not personally heard the recording. But she told Chuck Todd on Sunday that she later was able to hear a recording of Trump during a trip to Los Angeles.

 

“I heard his voice as clear as you and I are sitting here,” she said on the show.

 

The White House had previously tried to discredit the book, with Sanders calling it “riddled with lies and false accusations.” Trump on Saturday labeled Manigault Newman a “lowlife.”

 

Katrina Pierson, an adviser to Trump’s re-election campaign who served as a spokeswoman for his 2016 campaign, said she had never heard Trump use the kind of derogatory language Manigault Newman describes. She said in a statement that she feels “pity for Omarosa as she embarrasses herself by creating salacious lies and distortions just to try to be relevant and enrich herself by selling books at the expense of the truth. `Unhinged,’ indeed.”

 

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway also questioned Manigault Newman’s credibility in an interview Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

“The first time I ever heard Omarosa suggest those awful things about this president are in this book,” she said, noting Manigault Newman “is somebody who gave a glowing appraisal of Donald Trump the businessman, the star of the ‘The Apprentice,’ the candidate and, indeed, the president of the United States.”

 

Manigault Newman had indeed been a staunch defender of the president for years, including pushing back, as the highest-profile African-American in the White House, on accusations that he was racist.

 

But Manigault Newman now says she was “used” by Trump, calling him a “con” who “has been masquerading as someone who is actually open to engaging with diverse communities” and is “truly a racist.”

 

“I was complicit with this White House deceiving this nation,” she said. “I had a blind spot where it came to Donald Trump.”

 

 
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High-profile U.S. officials have visited South America in recent weeks to signal strength in inter-American alliances amid U.S. competitors’ increased interest in the region.

Speaking to reporters while traveling to Brazil Sunday, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said Russian and Chinese involvement in South America has had “zero impact” on military-to-military relationships with America’s Latin partners. 

Mattis said the United States supports “sovereign decisions by sovereign states,” while also cautioning against potentially damaging “inroads by other nations.” 

“There’s more than one way to lose sovereignty in this world. It’s not just by bayonets. It can also be by countries that come in bearing gifts and large loans…piling massive debt on countries knowing they know will not be able to repay it,” Mattis said, in what appeared to be a jab at Chinese loans to countries like Venezuela and the Philippines. 

Chinese influence in Latin America grows from a “larger commercial perspective” to “feed Chinese demand back home,” which Beijing then leverages to broaden security collaboration, the director of the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, Jason Marczak, told VOA. 

Russia’s role, however, “is specifically to undermine U.S. security interests,” Marczak said. Moscow has been providing weapons to countries like Nicaragua and Venezuela, where police regularly abuse and arrest citizens protesting against the government.

‘Partner of choice’

Mattis’s trip to the region follows a visit by the top Navy admiral, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson to Colombia, Chile, Argentina and Brazil.

In an exclusive interview with VOA, Richardson said the U.S. military, and especially the U.S. Navy, wants to make sure that it is the “security partner of choice” for Latin America. 

“We want to be that stable, steady, committed team that will be there for one another when the chips are down,” Richardson told VOA.

The U.S. Navy has been partnering with Latin American allies to combat illicit trafficking, particularly as it pertains to narcotics. Allies are also mindful of transnational types of terror threats, with partners in the Caribbean keeping a close watch for piracy, a crime Richardson called “terrorism at sea.”

Officials say other security areas are ripe for inter-American military cooperation, from humanitarian missions to cybersecurity.

Richardson said he believed shared values among inter-American militaries could help deepen transparency across their governments.

“The stability that these security relationships provide offers a lot of flexibility for the other elements of national power, whether those be diplomatic or economic,” Richardson said.

About a month before of Richardson’s visit, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence also spent a week in South America. Pence said on Twitter that he highlighted “opportunities for stronger economic and security relationships” during the trip while bringing renewed attention to the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.

Refugees fleeing violence in Venezuela have poured over the border into Brazil and Colombia, two of the stops on Secretary Mattis’s South America tour. Mattis will also travel to Argentina and Chile.
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