Oil is not new to Alaska. In fact, by some estimates it has been underground there roughly 300 million years, even before the North American and Pacific plates began their steady though belabored advance northward from near the equator. Alaska Natives utilized oil seeps in various ways since prehistoric times. Russians discovered seeps near Chinitna Bay on the western shores of Cook Inlet in the early 1800s. Similar seeps in the Baku region of the Caucasus had long nurtured a fledgling bitumen industry, producing a substance roughly akin to asphalt that had been used to strengthen mud bricks
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