The Denali Fault is a major right-lateral strike-slip fault that curves for more than 2,000 kilometres across interior Alaska and into Canada's Yukon, arcing around the flank of Denali, North America's highest peak. It accommodates part of the crustal deformation driven by the Pacific Plate colliding with and sliding past North America.
As a strike-slip system, its two sides grind horizontally, but the fault's curve also forces uplift, contributing over millions of years to the towering Alaska Range. Its motion averages several millimetres to a couple of centimetres per year across different segments.
The fault delivered the 2002 Denali earthquake, a magnitude 7.9 event that ruptured about 340 kilometres of surface and triggered thousands of landslides. Remarkably, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, engineered to flex across the fault, survived the strong shaking and metres of horizontal offset with no oil spill, a celebrated case of earthquake-resistant design.