LATE QUATERNARY CRUSTAL DEFORMATION AT THE APEX OF THE MOUNT MCKINLEY RESTRAINING BEND OF THE DENALI FAULT, ALASKA

The tallest mountain in North America, Mount McKinley is situated inside a sharp bend in the right‐lateral Denali fault. This anomalous topography is clearly associated with the complex geometry of the Denali fault, but how this topography evolves in conjunction with the adjacent strike‐slip fault is unknown. To constrain how this fault bend is deforming, the Quaternary fault‐related deformation on the opposite side of the Denali fault from Mount McKinley were documented through combined geologic mapping, active fault characterization, and analysis of background seismicity. My mapping illustrates an east‐west change in faulting style where normal faults occur east of the fault bend and thrust faults predominate to the west. These faults offset glacial outwash terraces and moraines which, with tentative correlations with the regional glacial history, provide fault slip rates that suggest that the Denali fault bend is migrating southwestward. The complex and elevated regional seismicity corroborates the style of faulting associated with the fault bend and provide additional subsurface control on the location of active faults. Seismologic and neotectonic constraints suggest that the maximum compressive stress axis rotates from vertical east of the bend to horizontal and Denali fault‐normal west of the bend

Persistent topographic development along a strike-slip fault system: The Mount McKinley restraining bend

The Denali Fault is a major strike-slip fault extending from British Colombia, into western Alaska. Mount McKinley, at 6,114 m, is the highest peak in North America and is located to the south of a bend in the Denali Fault (Fig.1). To the north, at the apex of the bend in the fault, Peters Dome (3,221 m) is the highest peak and north-side peak elevations rapidly decrease moving away from the bend’s apex

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead