A half hour before the 9:30 a.m. low tide Jan. 24, Efam Moonin of Nanwalek saw something strange: Water that should have been receding changed direction. Rather than going out, it began coming toward shore. Quickly.
"It's acting weird," Moonin said in a phone call to the Homer News. "I haven't seen this since the 1964 earthquake. It's making people around here wonder."
Nanwalek residents out for morning walks in the tiny southern Kenai Peninsula community facing Cook Inlet stopped to watch the water's action. Other residents left their homes and lined the bluff above the inlet, curious about what they were seeing as the water continued to shift directions, coming in and out with noticeable movement.
Alaska scientists aren't sure what was behind the strange phenomenon, but offered several possible explanations. What they had to say was enough to calm Moonin's fears of another 9.2 earthquake and accompanying tsunami similar to what terrorized residents of Southcentral Alaska more than 40 years ago.
"This was nothing generated by an earthquake and I'm not aware of any volcanic activity going on," Paul Whitmore of the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center said of last week's observations from Nanwalek. "Reports like this happen from time to time. Sometimes we can pin it down to an undersea landslide. Sometimes distant storms. Sometimes odd effects can be caused by moving pressure systems."
A review of earthquakes in the 24-hour period preceding the Nanwalek occurrence revealed seismic activity near Panama that registered 5.8 on the Richter scale, according to Dave Vonderheide with the National Weather Service in Anchorage.
"That's too weak and too far away to generate (this)," he said of what Nanwalek experienced.
Instead, Vonderheide looked west, to a storm in the Aleutians that happened within 48 hours of Moonin's sighting.
"It had wave heights of 45 feet and very strong winds," he said. "A lot of times a swell can be generated in a storm and travels out from the storm, sometimes across the Pacific Ocean."
Referred to by mariners as a "roller," it can present itself as a long wave that can measure five to 10 feet.
"These are coming from pretty far away, but that's a possibility," Vonderheide said, ruling out the likelihood that a meteor hitting the water somewhere in the area could be the cause.
"That kind of thing wouldn't be picked up on a seismograph, but they would have heard something if it was that big, so we can rule that out," Vonderheide said. "The swell is the closest thing we can come up with. If that's not the cause, then it's in the 'I don't know' category, the 'unusual phenomenon' category. Something to put some thought to."
Elena Suleimani of the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute in Fairbanks also ruled out an earthquake as the cause of Nanwalek's surging water. Instead, she suggested an underwater slump could be to blame and referenced an underwater landslide that occurred in Skagway in 1994. That incident generated a 30-foot wave that destroyed and damaged several structures in that Southeast Alaska community's harbor and killed Paul Wallin, 44, of Homer. Wallin, a welder, was working on a dock when it collapsed in the landslide.
By Jan. 25, the water in front of Nanwalek continued its pattern of receding and advancing, but did it more slowly than the previous day, according to Moonin.
"I think it's the waves," he said, choosing to attribute the water's movement to storms in the Aleutians. "It had a lot of people worried, thinking there might have been a tsunami somewhere."
Asked if animals, known to sometimes exhibit strange behavior before an earthquake, were acting normally, Moonin recalled ducks swimming in Nanwalek's near-shore, direction-shifting water.
"They looked kind of confused for awhile," he said.
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