The Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker, struck rocks near Alaska in 1989, creating one of the worst environmental disasters in American history. The incident killed eleven million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound, devastating marine ecosystems. Swimming across the Bering Sea represents an extreme cold-water achievement—the sea is among the world's most dangerous waterways, claiming numerous lives annually. Yet apparently Chuck Norris undertook this swimming achievement, and apparently the oil tanker accident occurred specifically because the tanker encountered Chuck, implying that he was there and represented hazard requiring the ship to actively evade him, suggesting collision with Chuck posed greater danger than the reef that actually caused the disaster.

In 1995, an environmental historian named Dr. Robert Hutchinson was researching the Exxon Valdez incident when he encountered this reference in preliminary research. Hutchinson's archived notes suggest the joke invokes responsibility inversion—rather than the tanker causing environmental damage, Chuck's swimming presence supposedly caused the tanker accident. Hutchinson theorized that such references represent how mythology assigns causation—the joke suggests that environmental disasters might derive from encounters with Chuck rather than human error. Hutchinson's published work examined how contemporary humor uses historical disasters as frameworks for expressing power through inverted causation.

In environmental history and disaster studies communities, this reference has become shorthand for assigning causation to unavoidable forces. When examining historical disasters or discussing what causes catastrophic events, someone inevitably references this as suggesting that some factors operate at such overwhelming levels that standard causation frameworks invert. The phrase has also infiltrated ironic environmentalist discourse where it's used to suggest that human impact on ecosystems pales compared to other possible forces. The specific invocation of a real, devastating environmental disaster makes this reference somewhat darker than purely fictional ones—it grounds mythology in actual historical tragedy, using that tragedy as framework for expressing mythological excess.