Kipnuk is a Central Yup’ik village situated on a sharp bend of the Kuguklik River, 5 miles (8 km) upstream from the estuary in Kinak Bay on the Bering Sea, about 98 miles (158 km) southwest of Bethel and 18 miles (29 km) south-southeast of Chefornak, Alaska. The name Kipnuk, which is also spelled ‘Qipneq’, is from the Yup’ik language and means ‘bend’, referring to the location. The river is a meandering stream that originates about 30 miles east in a flat area of tundra and lakes in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, and drains a watershed of 195,550 acres (79,136 ha). The name, which is also spelled ‘Kugkaktlik’, was first reported in 1878 by Edward W. Nelson of the U.S. Army Signal Service. The surrounding landscape is characterized by sub-arctic tundra, and the delta plain is crossed by many river channels, meander scars, oxbow lakes, sloughs, and contains more than 400,000 charted lakes. The active permafrost layer is estimated to range between 1.5 and 3 feet (0.5-0.9 m) deep, and covers poorly consolidated silt to coarse-gravel and semi-consolidated sandstone and conglomerate.

Kipnuk is a traditional community and most residents maintain a subsistence lifestyle of hunting, fishing, and gathering supplemented by revenue from commercial fishing. The Yup’ik people historically followed a nomadic lifestyle, inhabiting different locations with the changing seasons depending on animal migration patterns and seasonal variability of their food. Extensive trade networks throughout the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta were well established prior to contact with Russian explorers who arrive in the late 19th century, and by the time of contact with Europeans, the Yup’ik people in the region already had access to manufactured goods from trade routes across the Bering Strait. In the early 1800s, the Russian Orthodox Church established a presence in Yupʼik territory, and following the Alaska Purchase of 1867, Moravian missions and schools were established along the Kuskokwim River. The Bureau of Indian Affairs formally recognized the village of Kipnuk in 1922. In 1932, the Alaska Indian Service, then a part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, funded the construction of a school at Cheeching, a historical settlement, now abandoned, on the north shore of Kinak Bay. Due to transportation difficulties, it was not possible to get any farther than Kipnuk, at which point the building materials were landed. Authority was subsequently granted to erect the building at Kipnuk, and with the establishment of the school, other families moved to the village.

Kipnuk has a history of riverbank erosion and flooding. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers identified three primary areas of erosion, with calculated erosion rates between 6 and 9 feet (2-3 m) per year. The principal concern regards the erosion of infrastructure such as the barge landing and fuel off-loading point. Measurable erosion at Kipnuk is episodic, occurring mostly during the fall storm season, when the permafrost thaw has reached the deepest extent of the year. Thawing permafrost causes the ground to subside when the ice-rich layer drains and the soil settles to fill the void. Additional settlement can occur due to soil consolidation as the soil strength properties change from frozen to an unfrozen state. The lower ground elevation is then subject to further flooding. The thawing of permafrost can also result in a loss of building foundation support. Foundations designed for permafrost conditions may not necessarily perform as designed under degraded permafrost conditions, resulting in foundation settlement as both uniform and differential settlement. Thawing of permafrost due to increasing surface temperatures could also contribute to changes in river discharges and dynamics. River channel dynamics can be altered due to a reduction in soil strength properties of adjacent riverbank soils when compared to permafrost soil strength properties, thus, erosion rates could increase. Read more here and here. Explore more of Kipnuk and Kuguklik River here: