![]() ![]() I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s probably what we were hearing,” she said.īut how did so many Alaskans hear a sound from so far away? The short answer is that this volcanic blast was so big it traveled thousands of miles.įor the long answer, Ken Macpherson has some good insight. “To be honest, I still didn’t even really believe it after that until I saw the satellite images of the actual eruptions. Syverson says she saw on social media that people had posted about hearing similar things - and that the booming sounds were from an eruption in the South Pacific. The tsunami destroyed property in Hawaii and Japan, caused flooding in California and killed two people when the waves reached Peru. King Cove recorded waves just over three feet. In Alaska, the largest tsunami waves hit the Aleutians and the Alaska Peninsula. While Syverson says she wasn’t immediately alarmed, neither she nor Caldentey would have guessed that the sounds were coming from an underwater volcano erupting near Tonga.īut that’s what it was - an eruption so massive it sent sound waves and a tsunami throughout the Pacific. “I thought for sure it was my cat - like, what’s my cat doing? So he got blamed for most of it,” she said.įirst she thought her cat, then maybe fireworks, then she thought it could have just been bass coming from someone’s car. In Unalaska, Laresa Syverson woke to similar sounds and vibrations. “I went outside to check the cars because then I was like, well, maybe there’s a burglar trying to get into our cars. “I mean, it was intense.”Ĭould it be avalanche control? A burglar? Maybe the kids bouncing off the walls? Like many people, Caldentey had no idea what she was hearing. “How I would envision Pearl Harbor sounded - just constant, boom, boom, boom,” she said. Iris Caldentey and her kids were sleeping peacefully in their home early Saturday morning in Palmer when she woke up to loud, strange noises. But hours before those waves arrived, sounds from the blast reached the homes of many Alaskans - all the way from Juneau to the Aleutians. Waves of up to about three feet reached parts of Alaska by Saturday morning. An underwater volcano near the Kingdom of Tonga had erupted and sent waves thousands of miles across the ocean. (Image courtesy CIRA at Colorado State University)Ĭommunities across the West Coast woke up Saturday morning to tsunami advisory alerts. In Alaska, people reported hearing the eruption several hours before the tsunami made it to shore. An eruption of an underwater volcano near Tonga, which triggered a tsunami that was seen throughout the Pacific.
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