The people behind earthquake early warning

The people behind earthquake early warning

KODIAK ISLAND, Alaska - Alders, alders, everywhere.

When you follow scientists in the Alaska wilderness, you'll almost certainly get alder-snagged.

In November, near Homer, alders grew considerately on Grewingk Glacier till, with space to maneuver ourselves and our heavy packs.

A few days later, on Kodiak Island, the alders were a bit more rude. My fieldwork companion, University of Alaska Fairbanks doctoral student Cade Quigley, burst through yet another alder thicket and announced that we had arrived: "Here's the last mud pie."

I had been accompanying Quigley and fellow doctoral student Sarah Noel for a few days, collecting story ideas. Along the way, I'd begun to realize there might be two tales worth telling here: one about Alaska's future earthquake early warning system, and another about the people who are making it possible.

At the alder thicket on Kodiak, Quigley used his rock hammer to pick at a frozen pile of mud clutching a 6-pound seismic sensor, which resembled a marriage between a can of beans and a smoke alarm.

This sensor, one of 52 - half of them in Homer, half in Kodiak - that Quigley and other Alaska Earthquake Center scientists had installed a month earlier, now contained data from the thousand or so Southcentral Alaska earthquakes that occurred from early October to mid-November 2025.

Working with project lead and Alaska Earthquake Center Director Michael West, Quigley had arranged these new sensors into two arrays, specifically laid out to measure Alaska's potentially devastating offshore earthquakes. It's an essential step in implementing an earthquake early warning system in Alaska.

In the future, Alaskans may receive messages via the ShakeAlert system, funded by the U.S. Geological Survey and deployed in partnership with the earthquake center, a part of the UAF Geophysical Institute. The system can warn people that an earthquake has occurred and to expect strong shaking in a certain number of seconds. The Alaska implementation plan for ShakeAlert includes a dozen seismic arrays along its coastline.

The system is already available in California, Oregon and Washington.

Compared to traditional seismometers, an array can more accurately record large earthquakes that occur along Alaska's portion of the Ring of Fire, a seismically active horseshoe-shaped belt around the Pacific Ocean.

In this zone, "very large earthquakes are not just points on a map. It's like a very large rupture patch, sometimes several hundred kilometers long," Quigley said. "Basically, an array can see in real time where the front of that earthquake is moving."

With over 40,000 earthquakes detected annually and more than 52 above magnitude 5 so far this year, the hope is that Alaskans will find a warning system useful - and that lives will be saved.

But perhaps only a few people will pause to wonder how this hoped-for system is progressing from "mud pie" sensors toward a tidy phone message.

For just this one sliver of the overall warning system effort, Quigley skillfully knitted together months of planning: vehicle rentals, plane tickets, lithium battery shipments, safety plans and many other large and small tasks.

And of course, fieldwork isn't just logistics. Flying home to Fairbanks, I found myself thinking about small, shared human moments: laughing over Quigley eating clam chowder with chopsticks, smiling through a day of sideways rain in Kodiak and a bluebird-sky celebration after the last sensor was pulled. Collectively, these moments became a counterpoint to Quigley's logistical work - a reminder that the path to earthquake early warning runs through real people.

What's next for Quigley now that the fieldwork is over? He will spend the next few months analyzing his sensor data with the goal of determining the optimal number and configuration of these sensors for detecting offshore earthquakes. And perhaps, from the comfort of his dry, warm office, he'll look back fondly on sideways rain.

Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute has provided the Alaska Science Forum column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Guest columnist Sara Wilbur, filling in for Ned Rozell this week, is the communications coordinator for the Geophysical Institute.