Alaska’s ice cellars melting due to climate change after being used to store food for generations

Rising temperatures are causing dramatic changes to an ancient way of life in Alaska’s far-north

After generations of storing their food in handmade cellars dug deep into the permafrost, growing numbers in Alaska’s far-north now find their cellars filling up with water and blood.

Dozens of the naturally refrigerated food shelters exist underneath the region’s mainly Inupiat whaling villages – where many rely on hunting and fishing to eat.

But now climate change and other modern factors are forcing changes to an ancient way of life, rendering traditional storage methods dangerously unreliable.

Ranging from small arctic root cellars to spacious, wood-lined underground chambers, ice cellars are typically stocked with vast amounts of whale, walrus, seal and caribou.

Alaska's traditional ice cellars, upon which many native communities rely upon for large portions of their diet in the harsher months, are being impacted by climate change ( Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium/AP )

These chambers, usually built 10 to 12 feet below the surface, have long been used to age subsistence food to perfection and ensure a steady supply during the sparser months, which is critical for survival.

But increasingly, these cellars are beginning to collect mould and water, in some cases becoming completely submerged. Others collapse completely.

In Alaska’s northernmost community, Utqiagvik – which saw its warmest summer on record this year – about 60 per cent of the 1,500 households rely on subsistence foods for at least half of their diet, National Geographic wrote in 2015.

“I’m worried,” said Gordon Brower, a Utqiagvik whaling captain whose family owns two ice cellars.

One is more than a century old and used to store at least two tonnes whale meat set aside for community feasts. The other, built in 1955, is used to feed Mr Brower and his family.

He recently asked his son to retrieve some whale meat from the one of the cellars, and discovered both were in a bad state.

“He came back and said: ‘Dad, there’s a pool of blood and water at the bottom,’” said Mr Brower, who is now housing the community’s meat under a tarpaulin sheet above ground.

“It seems like slight temporary variations in the permafrost – that active layer – is affecting the temperature of our cellar,” Mr Brower said.

There were once at least 50 ice cellars in Point Hope, a native village built precariously on a thin spit of land caught between the Chukchi and Arctic oceans.

Now, there are less than 20 cellars in the village of 750 people.

Many in the community have little money and cannot afford to replace traditional methods with modern freezers.

To compensate, Point Hope whaling captains have use of three walk-in freezers that were donated for use by the whaling community.

But the much colder freezers do not impart the taste of aged whale meat so favoured throughout the region.

“It’s definitely a challenge at this time to be able to feed our people that acquired taste,” said 52-year-old whaling captain Russell Lane, who has spent his whole life in Point Hope.

The problem has been building for decades as a warming climate impacts multiple facets of life in the far-north – thawing permafrost, disruptions in hunting patterns and shorter periods of coastal ice that had long protected coastal communities from powerful storms. Other factors include development and soil conditions.

The changes have increased vulnerability to foodborne illnesses and raised concerns about food security, according to studies by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium.

State health officials said so far they have not heard of anyone becoming ill.

Despite the unprecedented rate of modern climate change, ice cellars have failed as far back as the early 1900s, according to a 2017 study in Utqiagvik in response to reports of flooded and collapsed cellars.

An entrance to a traditional Alaskan ice cellar (Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium/AP)

Researchers mapped 71 ice cellar locations around town and monitored five functioning cellars from 2005 to 2015, finding little thermal change over that relatively short timeframe. One of those cellars has since failed, however, and another is starting to collapse.

The study concluded that while a changing climate has great potential to affect ice cellars, there are other factors, including soil conditions and urban development.

“Climate change, air temperatures, all these physical changes are affecting them,” said Kelsey Nyland from George Washington University, one of the study’s authors.

“But also, a lot of it has to do with development and modern life in an arctic setting.”

Scientists had previously agreed that an underground tunnel, known as the utilidor, built in Utqiagvik in 1984 to provide water, electricity, and other utilities had been responsible for the failure of some cellars, National Geographic reported in 2015.

To adapt to the new environment, the village of Kaktovik, on the Beaufort Sea coast, took ambitious steps after it lost all but one family’s cellar to flooding.

In 2013, the village launched a project to build a community ice cellar incorporating traditional designs with contemporary technology used in Alaska’s North Slope oil fields – thermosyphons, off-grid tubelike refrigeration devices that cool the ground by transferring heat outside.

The hand-excavated cellar was ready for use in 2017, but it has yet to be filled. Whaling captains want to expand it first, according to whaling captain George Kaleak Sr, who represents Kaktovik on the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission.

Temperature sensors inside the cellar show it’s working as intended, Kaleak said. He expects the expansion to begin as early as next spring.

But experts warn melting ice cellars are a problem for hunters across the Arctic.

While some communities are able to avert crisis using modern technology, in Siberia the disappearance of millennia-old permafrost is now creating climate refugees.

With researchers continually revising their predictions for how quickly permafrost could melt, and how this could contribute to the warming of the planet, it seems increasingly likely those forced to leave their homes will not be the last.

“The permafrost is thawing so fast,” Anna Liljedahl, associate professor at the University of Alaska told The Washington Post in October “We scientists can’t keep up anymore.”

(Source: Independent)

This Alaskan town won't see the sun for 65 days

If you're a night owl, you may want to consider spending your winters in northern Alaska.

Utqiagvik, Alaska, formerly known as Barrow, experienced its last sunrise and sunset on Sunday for about two months.

The town of about 4,000 people is now beginning its 65-day period of darkness, known as polar night.

Polar night is a common term in places that don't experience sunrise for more than 24 hours, according to CNN meteorologist Judson Jones.

Utqiagvik, Alaska, experiences some last glimpses of daylight before starting 65 days of darkness.

"This happens every year," Jones said. "If you live above the Arctic Circle, there will be a day when the sun sets for the rest of winter. The good news? It will return and then during the summer when it won't set for days."

The northern third of Alaska lies above the Arctic Circle, the ring of latitude that encircles the frigid Arctic polar region.

Although Utqiagvik is not the only Alaskan town to experience this phenomenon, it is the first one on the polar night location list because of how far north it is.

For about one to two months, the residents of Kaktovik, Point Hope and Anaktuvuk Pass will also be without the sun. Their final sunsets will happen between late November and early December, according to CNN affiliate KTUU.

The sun officially set at 1:43 p.m. Sunday in Utqiagvik, starting its 65-day hiatus from the town. It won't peek above the horizon again until January 23, 2019.

(Source: CNN)

When whales and humans talk

Arctic people have been communicating with cetaceans for centuries—and scientists are finally taking note, writes Krista Langlois in Hakai Magazine. Read on: 

Harry Brower Sr. was lying in a hospital bed in Anchorage, Alaska, close to death, when he was visited by a baby whale.

Although Brower’s body remained in Anchorage, the young bowhead took him more than 1,000 kilometers north to Barrow (now Utqiaġvik), where Brower’s family lived. They traveled together through the town and past the indistinct edge where the tundra gives way to the Arctic Ocean. There, in the ice-blue underwater world, Brower saw Iñupiat hunters in a sealskin boat closing in on the calf’s mother.

Brower felt the shuddering harpoon enter the whale’s body. He looked at the faces of the men in the umiak, including those of his own sons. When he awoke in his hospital bed as if from a trance, he knew precisely which man had made the kill, how the whale had died, and whose ice cellar the meat was stored in. He turned out to be right on all three counts.

Tattooed Whale, 2016 by Tim Pitsiulak. Screen-print on Arches Cover Black. Reproduced with the permission of Dorset Fine Arts

Brower lived six years after the episode, dying in 1992 at the age of 67. In his final years, he discussed what he had witnessed with Christian ministers and Utqiaġvik’s whaling captains. The conversations ultimately led him to hand down new rules to govern hunting female whales with offspring, meant to communicate respect to whales and signal that people were aware of their feelings and needs. “[The whale] talked to me,” Brower recalls in a collection of his stories, The Whales, They Give Themselves. “He told me all the stories about where they had all this trouble out there on the ice.”

Not long ago, non-Indigenous scientists might have dismissed Brower’s experience as a dream or the inchoate ramblings of a sick man. But he and other Iñupiat are part of a deep history of Arctic and subarctic peoples who believe humans and whales can talk and share a reciprocal relationship that goes far beyond that of predator and prey. Today, as Western scientists try to better understand Indigenous peoples’ relationships with animals—as well as animals’ own capacity for thoughts and feelings—such beliefs are gaining wider recognition, giving archaeologists a better understanding of ancient northern cultures.

“If you start looking at the relationship between humans and animals from the perspective that Indigenous people themselves may have had, it reveals a rich new universe,” says Matthew Betts, an archaeologist with the Canadian Museum of History who studies Paleo-Eskimo cultures in the Canadian Arctic. “What a beautiful way to view the world.”

It’s not clear exactly when people developed the technology that allowed them to begin hunting whales, but scholars generally believe Arctic whaling developed off the coast of Alaska sometime between 600 and 800 CE. For thousands of years before then, Arctic people survived by hunting seals, caribou, and walruses at the edge of the sea ice.

One such group, the Dorset—known in Inuit oral tradition as the Tunit—were rumored to have been so strong the men could outrun caribou and drag a 1,700-kilogram walrus across the ice. The women were said to have fermented raw seal meat against the warmth of their skin, leaving it in their pants for days at a time. But despite their legendary survival skills, the Tunit died out 1,000 years ago.

An Inuit hunter sits on a whale that’s been hauled to shore for butchering in Point Hope, Alaska, in 1900. Photo by Hulton Deutsch/Getty Images

One theory for their mysterious disappearance is that they were outcompeted by people who had begun to move east into the Canadian Arctic—migrants from Alaska who brought sealskin boats allowing them to push off from shore and hunt whales. Each spring, bowhead whales weighing up to 54,000 kilograms pass through the leads of water that open into the sea ice, and with skill and luck, the ancestors of today’s Inuit and Iñupiat people could spear a cetacean as it surfaced to breathe.

The advent of whaling changed the North. For the first time, hunters could bring in enough meat to feed an entire village. Permanent settlements began springing up in places like Utqiaġvik that were reliably visited by bowheads—places still inhabited today. Social organizations shifted as successful whale hunters amassed wealth, became captains, and positioned themselves at the top of a developing social hierarchy. Before long, the whale hunt became the center of cultural, spiritual, and day-to-day life, and whales the cornerstone of many Arctic and subarctic cosmologies.

When agricultural Europeans began visiting and writing about the North in the 10th century, they were mesmerized by Aboriginal peoples’ relationships with whales. Medieval literature depicted the Arctic as a land of malevolent “monstrous fishes” and people who could summon them to shore through magical powers and mumbled spells. Even as explorers and missionaries brought back straightforward accounts of how individual whaling cultures went about hunting, butchering, and sharing a whale, it was hard to shake the sense of mysticism. In 1938, American anthropologist Margaret Lantis analyzed these scattered ethnographic accounts and concluded that Iñupiat, Inuit, and other northern peoples belonged to a circumpolar “whale cult.”

Lantis found evidence of this in widespread taboos and rituals meant to cement the relationship between people and whales. In many places, a recently killed whale was given a drink of fresh water, a meal, and even traveling bags to ensure a safe journey back to its spiritual home. Individual whalers had their own songs to call the whales to them. Sometimes shamans performed religious ceremonies inside circles made of whale bones. Stashes of whaling amulets—an ambiguous word used to describe everything from carved, jewelry-like charms to feathers or skulls—were passed from father to son in whaling families.

To non-Indigenous observers, it was all so mysterious. So unknowable. And for archaeologists and biologists especially, it was at odds with Western scientific values, which prohibited anything that smacked of anthropomorphism.

A whaler waits for the bowhead whales from shore in Utqiaġvik, Alaska, during whaling season in the Chukchi Sea. Photo by Steven J. Kazlowski/Alamy Stock Photo

In archaeology, such attitudes have limited our understanding of Arctic prehistory, says Erica Hill, a zooarchaeologist with the University of Alaska Southeast. Whaling amulets and bone circles were written off as ritualistic or supernatural with little exploration of what they actually meant to the people who created them. Instead, archaeologists who studied animal artifacts often focused on the tangible information they revealed about what ancient people ate, how many calories they consumed, and how they survived.

Hill is part of a burgeoning branch of archaeology that uses ethnographic accounts and oral histories to re-examine animal artifacts with fresh eyes—and interpret the past in new, non-Western ways. “I’m interested in this as part of our prehistory as humans,” Hill says, “but also in what it tells us about alternative ways of being.”

The idea that Indigenous people have spiritual relationships with animals is so well established in popular culture it’s cliché. Yet constricted by Western science and culture, few archaeologists have examined the record of human history with the perspective that animals feel emotions and can express those emotions to humans.

Hill’s interest in doing so was piqued in 2007, when she was excavating in Chukotka, Russia, just across the Bering Strait from Alaska. The site was estimated to be 1,000 to 2,000 years old, predating the dawn of whaling in the region, and was situated at the top of a large hill. As her team dug through the tundra, they uncovered six or seven intact walrus skulls deliberately arranged in a circle.

Like many archaeologists, Hill had been taught that ancient humans in harsh northern climates conserved calories and rarely expended energy doing things with no direct physical benefit. That people were hauling walrus skulls to a hilltop where there were plenty of similar-sized rocks for building seemed strange. “If you’ve ever picked up a walrus skull, they’re really, really heavy,” Hill says. So she started wondering: did the skulls serve a purpose that wasn’t strictly practical that justified the effort of carrying them uphill?

When Hill returned home, she began looking for other cases of “people doing funky stuff” with animal remains. There was no shortage of examples: shrines packed with sheep skulls, ceremonial burials of wolves and dogs, walrus-skull rings on both sides of the Bering Strait. To Hill, though, some of the most compelling artifacts came from whaling cultures.

Museum collections across North America, for instance, include a dazzling array of objects categorized as whaling amulets. From this grab bag, Hill identified 20 carved wooden objects that served as the seats of whaling boats. In the Iñupiaq language, they’re called either iktuġat or aqutim aksivautana, depending on dialect.

One in particular stands out. Hill was looking for Alaskan artifacts in a massive climate-controlled warehouse belonging to Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. The artifacts were housed in hundreds of floor-to-ceiling drawers, row after row of them, with little indication of what was inside. She pulled open one drawer and there it was—the perfect likeness of a bowhead whale staring back at her.

The seat, likely from the late 19th century, was hewn from a hunk of driftwood into a crescent shape, just large enough for a grown man to sit on. Carved on one side was a bowhead, looking as it would look if you were gazing down on a whale from above, perhaps from a raven’s-eye perspective. A precious bead of obsidian was embedded in the blowhole. “It’s so elegant and simple but so completely whale,” Hill says. “It’s this perfect balance of minimalism and form.”

Sometime in the late 19th century, an Iñupiaq carver fashioned this seat for an umiak out of driftwood, carving the likeness of a bowhead whale, its blowhole symbolized with a piece of obsidian. Photo by Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institute (Cat. A347918)

Using Iñupiat oral histories and ethnographies recorded in the 19th and 20th centuries, Hill now knows that this and other iktuġat were meant to be placed in a boat with the likeness of the whale facing down, toward the ocean. The meticulously rendered art was thus meant not for humans, but for whales—to flatter them, Hill says, and call them to the hunters. “The idea is that the whale will be attracted to its own likeness, so obviously you want to depict the whale in the most positive way possible,” she explains.

Yupik stories from St. Lawrence Island tell of whales who might spend an hour swimming directly under an umiak, positioning themselves so they could check out the seats and the men occupying them. If the boat was clean, the carvings beautiful, and the men respectful, the whale might reposition itself to be harpooned. If the art portrayed the whale in an unflattering light or the boat was dirty, it indicated that the hunters were lazy and wouldn’t treat the whale’s body properly. Then the whale might swim away.

“Like my aunt said, the whales have ears and are more like people,” Point Hope, Alaska, resident Kirk Oviok is quoted in the book Thinking with Water. “The first batch of whales seen would show up to check which ones in the whaling crew would be more hospitable. … Then the whales would come back to their pack and tell them about the situation.”

The belief that whales have agency and can communicate their needs to people isn’t unique to the Arctic. Farther south, on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula and British Columbia’s Vancouver Island, Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth whalers observed eight months of rituals meant to communicate respect in the mysterious language of whales. They bathed in special pools, prayed, spoke quietly, and avoided startling movements that might offend whales. Right before the hunt, the whalers sang a song asking the whale to give itself.

In Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth belief, as in many Arctic cultures, whales weren’t just taken—they willingly gave themselves to human communities. A whale that offered its body wasn’t sentencing itself to death. It was choosing to be killed by hunters who had demonstrated, through good behavior and careful adherence to rituals, that they would treat its remains in a way that would allow it to be reborn. Yupik tradition, for example, holds that beluga whales once lived on land and long to return to terra firma. In exchange for offering itself to a Yupik community, a beluga expected to have its bones given the ritualistic treatment that would allow it to complete this transition and return to land, perhaps as one of the wolves that would gnaw on the whale’s bones.

According to Hill, many of the objects aiding this reciprocity—vessels used to offer whales a drink of fresh water, amulets that hunters used to negotiate relationships with animal spirits—weren’t just reserved for shamanistic ceremonies. They were part of everyday life; the physical manifestation of an ongoing, daily dialogue between the human and animal worlds.

While Westerners domesticated and eventually industrialized the animals we eat—and thus came to view them as dumb and inferior—Arctic cultures saw whale hunting as a match between equals. Bipedal humans with rudimentary technology faced off against animals as much as 1,000 times their size that were emotional, thoughtful, and influenced by the same social expectations that governed human communities. In fact, whales were thought to live in an underwater society paralleling that above the sea.

It’s difficult to assess populations of animals that swim under the ice, far from
view, like bowhead whales. But experienced Iñupiat whalers are good
at it. Photo by Steven Kazlowski/Minden Pictures

Throughout history, similar beliefs have guided other human-animal relationships, especially in hunter-gatherer cultures that shared their environment with big, potentially dangerous animals. Carvings left behind by the Tunit, for example, suggest a belief that polar bears possessed a kind of personhood allowing them to communicate with humans; while some Inuit believed walruses could listen to humans talking about them and react accordingly.

Whether or not those beliefs are demonstrably true, says Hill, they “make room for animal intelligence and feelings and agency in ways that our traditional scientific thinking has not.”

Today, as archaeologists like Hill and Matthew Betts shift their interpretation of the past to better reflect Indigenous worldviews, biologists too are shedding new light on whale behavior and biology that seems to confirm the traits Indigenous people have attributed to whales for more than 1,000 years. Among them is Hal Whitehead, a professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who argues that cetaceans have their own culture—a word typically reserved for human societies.

By this definition, culture is social learning that’s passed down from one generation to the next. Whitehead finds evidence for his theory in numerous recent studies, including one that shows bowhead whales in the North Pacific, off the Alaskan coast, and in the Atlantic Ocean near Greenland sing different songs, the way human groups might have different styles of music or linguistic dialects. Similarly, pods of resident killer whales living in the waters off south Vancouver Island greet each other with different behaviors than killer whales living off north Vancouver Island, despite the fact that the groups are genetically almost identical and have overlapping territories.

Plus, calves spend years with their mothers, developing the strong mother-offspring bonds that serve to transfer cultural information, and bowhead whales live long enough to accumulate the kind of environmental knowledge that would be beneficial to pass on to younger generations. We know this largely because of a harpoon tip that was found embedded in a bowhead in northern Alaska in 2007. This particular harpoon was only manufactured between 1879 and 1885 and wasn’t used for long after, meaning that the whale had sustained its injury at least 117 years before it finally died.

Other beliefs, too, are proving less farfetched than they once sounded. For years, scientists believed whales couldn’t smell, despite the fact that Iñupiat hunters claimed the smell of woodsmoke would drive a whale away from their camp. Eventually, a Dutch scientist dissecting whale skulls proved the animals did, indeed, have the capacity to smell. Even the Yupik belief that beluga whales were once land-dwelling creatures is rooted in reality: some 50 million years ago, the ancestor of modern-day whales walked on land. As if recalling this, whale fetuses briefly develop legs before losing them again.

Inuit hunters in Utqiaġvik, Alaska, paddle an umiak after a bowhead whale. Photo by Galen Rowell/Getty Images

None of this suggests that whales freely give themselves to humans. But once you understand the biological and intellectual capabilities of whales—as whaling cultures surely did—it’s less of a leap to conclude that cetaceans live in their own underwater society, and can communicate their needs and wishes to humans willing to listen.

With the dawn of the 20th century and the encroachment of Euro-Americans into the North, Indigenous whaling changed drastically. Whaling in the Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth Nations essentially ended in the 1920s after commercial whalers hunted the gray whale to near extinction. In Chukotka, Russian authorities in the 1950s replaced community-based whaling with state-run whaling.

Even the whaling strongholds of Alaska’s Iñupiat villages weren’t immune. In the 1970s, the International Whaling Commission ordered a halt to subsistence bowhead whaling because US government scientists feared there were just 1,300 of the animals left. Harry Brower Sr. and other whaling captains who’d amassed lifetimes of knowledge knew that figure was wrong.

But unlike other whaling cultures, Iñupiat whalers had the means to fight back, thanks to taxes they had collected from a nearby oil boom. With the money, communities hired Western-trained scientists to corroborate traditional knowledge. The scientists developed a new methodology that used hydrophones to count bowhead whales beneath the ice, rather than extrapolating the population based on a count of the visible bowheads passing by a single, ice-free locale. Their findings proved bowheads were far more numerous than the government had previously thought, and subsistence whaling was allowed to continue.

Elsewhere, too, whaling traditions have slowly come back to life. In 1999, the Makah harvested their first whale in over 70 years. The Chukchi were allowed to hunt again in the 1990s.

Yet few modern men knew whales as intimately as Brower. Although he eschewed some traditions—he said he never wanted his own whaling song to call a harpooned whale to the umiak, for example—Brower had other ways of communicating with whales. He believed that whales listened, and that if a whaler was selfish or disrespectful, whales would avoid him. He believed that the natural world was alive with animals’ spirits, and that the inexplicable connection he’d felt with whales could only be explained by the presence of such spirits.

And he believed that in 1986, a baby whale visited him in an Anchorage hospital to show him how future generations could maintain the centuries-long relationship between humans and whales. Before he died, he told his biographer Karen Brewster that although he believed in a Christian heaven, he personally thought he would go elsewhere. “I’m going to go join the whales,” he said. “That’s the best place, I think. … You could feed all the people for the last time.”

Perhaps Brower did become a whale and feed his people one last time. Or perhaps, through his deep understanding of whale biology and behavior, he passed down the knowledge that enabled his people to feed themselves for generations to come. Today, the spring whaling deadline he proposed based on his conversation with the baby whale is still largely observed, and bowhead whales continue to sustain Iñupiat communities, both physically and culturally.

Tsunami warnings canceled after magnitude-7.9 earthquake off Alaska

Forecasters canceled tsunami warnings for Alaska and the US and Canadian west coasts Tuesday after an earthquake in the Gulf of Alaska stoked fears of damaging waves.

The tsunami alerts were canceled "because additional information and analysis have better defined the threat," said the National Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, Alaska.

Small tsunami waves of less than 1 foot were reported in Alaska, the center said.

The minor tsunami was triggered by a magnitude-7.9 earthquake that struck the Gulf of Alaska shortly after midnight. It was centered about 175 miles southeast of Kodiak, Alaska, at a depth of 15 miles, the US Geological Survey said.

Although the tsunami warnings were canceled, San Francisco officials warned residents to stay away from coastlines for 12 hours.

Shoreline areas, marinas and harbors may have "dangerous, strong & unpredictable currents," the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management tweeted.

Tsunami Watch CANCELLED in #SF, but shoreline areas, marinas, & harbors may have dangerous, strong, & unpredictable currents. Stay away from coastlines for at least 12 hours. Visit https://t.co/kvgkapMonx to learn more about tsunami preparedness. pic.twitter.com/Dq6D1c9jcR

— San Francisco DEM (@SF_emergency) January 23, 2018

'Whole town is evacuating'
Nathaniel Moore was on a commercial fishing boat in Kodiak when the quake hit. He said he felt it "shake really good for a minute." He and others on the vessel quickly got to shore and headed for higher ground amid the tsunami warning.

"The whole town is evacuating," he told CNN early Tuesday.

Tsunami sirens sounded in Kodiak, and police warned: "This is not a drill."

Though the tsunami warnings and evacuation calls were canceled, schools in Kodiak canceled classes Tuesday after campuses opened overnight as emergency shelters, the district announced via Facebook.

Wendy Bliss Snipes described the quake as "a slow roller, so it was felt for at least a minute before the real rolling started. Nothing fell off the walls, and I didn't have to wake my kiddo."

Heather Rand, who was in Anchorage, Alaska, told CNN that the earthquake felt like the longest she had ever experienced.

"It was a very long, slow build up. Creepy, more than anything. Definitely the longest, and I was born here," Rand said. She reported no damage besides cracks in the drywall.

Why this wasn't a lot worse
Both the earthquake and tsunami could have been much worse. But two key factors helped minimize damage.

First, the quake was centered out in the water, helping prevent catastrophic damage to structures on land.

Second, this quake resulted from a strike-slip fault -- meaning pressure built up as two plates moved horizontally, CNN senior meteorologist Dave Hennen said.

That's a lot less dangerous than a thrust fault, which happens when a plate displaces vertically.

"These are the quakes that produce the large tsunamis," Hennen said, such as the devastating 2011 quake and tsunami that killed more than 20,000 people in Japan.

(Source: CNN)

Massive 8.2 magnitude quake in Alaska sparks tsunami warnings across US

The earthquake struck 157 miles southeast of Chiniak, Alaska at a depth of 6.2 miles at 9.31 GMT, the US Geological Survey said

A HUGE 8.2-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Alaska sparked tsunami warnings down the whole West Coast of the US and Canada today.

Residents in coastal towns close to the epicentre were woken in the night by warning sirens and urged to flee their homes for ground at least 100ft above sea level amid warnings of an “extraordinary threat to life”.

The 8.2 magnitude earthquake struck out at sea in the Gulf of Alaska

British Columbia in Canada, along with Washington, Oregon, California and Hawaii were all put on tsunami watch – with San Franciscans told to prepare for a possible evacuation – although they have now been stood down.

And a tsunami warning for Alaska has now been downgraded – although locals who had fled were warned not to return home until the all-clear could be given.

Residents living close to the epicentre of the quake spoke of being woken in the dead of night by warning sirens.

Tsunami alarms rang out out across Kodiak, located about 157 miles north-west of where the tremor struck, prompting a massive evacuation.

What we know so far:

• An earthquake of 8.2 magnitude struck off the coast of Alaska at 9.30am GMT
• The quake triggered tsunami alerts along the whole US West Coast
• Residents living near the epicentre were woken by warning sirens in the dead of night
• Locals in towns like Kodiak were urged to flee their homes and head for higher ground at least 100ft above sea level
• A buoy out at sea near the epicentre detected a 32ft wave soon after the tremor
• Tsunami watches for British Columbia in Canada, along with Washington, Oregon, California and Hawaii have been cancelled
• A tsunami warning for Alaska has been downgraded, although residents were told not to return to their homes until the all-clear had been given

Locals were seen fleeing the city in their cars as authorities ordered them to head to higher ground after a 32ft wave was detected out at sea.

Kodiak cop Sgt Beaver told social media users in the town: “This is not a drill, this is a tsunami warning. Everybody get at least 100ft above sea level.”

The Anchorage Office of Emergency Management warned those living in coastal areas of Alaska and British Columbia: "If you are located in this coastal area, move inland to higher ground.

"Tsunami warnings mean that a tsunami with significant inundation is possible or is already occurring.

"Tsunamis are a series of waves dangerous many hours after initial arrival time. The first wave may not be the largest."

This advice was earlier issued to people in the warning areas

Authorities sent out text message warnings urging people to flee to high ground

This chart explains the difference between tsunami watches and warnings

Meanwhile, Alaskans took to social media to tell of their terror at being forced to flee their homes in the night.

One Twitter user wrote: “Tsunami sirens going off in Kodiak after the earthquake, I usually only ever hear the weekly siren test at 2pm on Wednesdays so hearing it at 1am on Tuesday is actually terrifying!!”

Residents of Anchorage - Alaska's largest city located around 500 miles from the epicentre - said they were alerted to it by text messages.

"Shook the house pretty good and just kept going. Hope the people down south are alright."

Shaun Dyess wrote: "I’m here in anchorage Alaska. It was shaking for along time. Hope no one got hurt."

And JoLynn Lund tweeted: The #earthquake was enough to wake you. The #tsunami alert alarm gets you out of bed."

A map shows the estimated times a wave would take to reach different regions

Alaska Governor Bill Walker said: “We are closely monitoring the earthquake and tsunami warnings affecting many coastal communities this morning.

“I have been in contact with local officials, resident, and Major General Hummel and will remain in close communication with them throughout the day.

“Please heed local warnings to move inland or to higher ground.

“My thanks to first responders and media outlets across the state for going beyond the call of duty to keep Alaskans safe.”

What happens next?
People close to the epicentre of the quake were ordered to flee their homes and head to higher ground at least 100ft above sea level.

In Alaska, people packed into high schools and other evacuation centres after the quake hit shortly after midnight local time (9am GMT).

People have been asked to remain there and refrain from returning to their homes until the all-clear is given.

Has this happened before?
The infamous Good Friday Earthquake which hit Alaska in 1964 sparked numerous tsunamis inflicting heavy damage on Kodiak, along with Valdez, Whittier and Seward.

Anchorage – the biggest city in Alaska – was hit by multiple landslides, destroying city blocks and neighbourhoods.

An estimated 139 people were killed, most by tsunamis – including 16 deaths in Oregon and California.

(Source: The Sun)