Few may know that GI was established by an act of Congress, “mainly because of effects on high frequency communication that’s caused by the aurora,” McCoy explains. “They were always having issues in the Arctic and sub-Arctic with communication—actually global issues with high frequency communication, because it depends on the ionosphere and the ionosphere gets disturbed by the sun.”

That specific and targeted directive launched GI, but the institute’s mission and activities has diverged significantly over nearly eight decades, in no small part because of the abundance of natural phenomena the state has to offer. “There’s lot of really interesting geophysical things in Alaska; I joke that we have a mountain of all these things,” McCoy laughs.

GI has seven research groups—atmospheric science; volcanology; seismology and geodesy; tectonics and sedimentation; space physics and aeronomy; remote sensing; and snow, ice, and permafrost—that study seven things that “no other university in the United States has,” McCoy says, right outside its door: the aurora, volcanoes, permafrost, earthquakes, glaciers, sea ice, and Arctic weather.

“That shapes who we are and what we do,” he says. “And from time to time, industry is very interested.”

As an example, he says GI trades data with those working in the oil industry. “Oil companies do a lot of prospecting and a lot of testing, and our guys use that data to get a better understanding of the structure of the Earth, and it goes back and forth,” McCoy explains. “Most of our students, staff, and faculty are out in the field in the summer, running around in helicopters and updating stations, things like that.”

The data gathered is immense both in its scale and value.

“We have something called Research Computing Services, and there’s about ten people in that group,” he explains. “They maintain UNIX clusters of high-performance computers that we make available to all of GI—actually to all of campus—and they maintain petabytes of storage. A petabyte is a thousand terabytes: it’s a lot.”

And even then, it’s not always enough. GI works with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, for which it downlinks from satellites and processes data, and “they want us to have more computing power,” McCoy says, “so we’ve been buying more computers and more storage,” which he says has helped GI stay competitive with other research facilities.

Attracting partners in data exploration and research is important for GI, UAF, and the Fairbanks area as a whole. While a small proportion of GI’s projects are funded by the State of Alaska, generally related to flying unmanned aircraft, most of GI’s funding (McCoy says approximately 90 percent) is from federal sources, primarily the National Science Foundation, NASA, USGS, and “increasingly” the Department of Defense. GI attracts national dollars and brings them to Alaska to the tune of nearly $70 million. “That money is spent on Safeway and Fred Meyer and rent,” McCoy says. “I compare us to an F16 squadron; we have the same kind of impact on the town.”

After seventy-five years of quality work and steady expansion, GI is an economic force of its own, both in terms of the money it pulls in and the development of technology and projects that its research facilitates. Data is in many ways a natural resource—once extracted, it lends itself to an almost endless number of projects—and GI is a local leader of data acquisition, assessment, and application.

One GI facility many Alaskans are familiar with is the Alaska Earthquake Center. Most of us have popped onto its website at one time or another, curious about the magnitude of the earthquake that just woke us up or wondering where it was located. And while it’s happy to satisfy our curiosity, the Alaska Earthquake Center has a much larger mission.

“For several decades the Alaska Earthquake Center has provided the state of Alaska’s seismic monitoring,” says Michael West, research professor, state seismologist, and director of the Alaska Earthquake Center. “Our primary mandate from the Alaska legislature, written into state statute, is to inform the state of seismic risks and hazards, essentially.”

According to Alaska Earthquake Center: A 2020 Perspective, in 2020 there were 49,250 earthquakes in Alaska, and the center spent more than 7,000 hours on earthquake analysis. “At the heart of the Alaska Earthquake Center is a network of 250 remote monitoring stations all over the state,” West reports. “We have instrumentation in every corner of the state—from the far Aleutians to Southeast to the most remote parts of the North Slope. Every hundred miles or so, there’s a sensor.” The center devotes significant resources to maintaining the network, including 123 site visits in 2020 alone, to make sure that when there is a seismic event, the center knows “in a matter of seconds.”

West says, “When you turn on the radio and you hear, ‘There was a magnitude 4.2 earthquake, turns out it was an aftershock of the 2018 magnitude 7,’ that information is something that we’re processing from all of these stations.” Once the raw data comes in, it’s seismologists that make sense of it and communicate it to the public.

Outside of its primary directive, the Alaska Earthquake Center does take on partners and projects that support its core goals.

Last year, as part of a pilot project with the Missile Defense Agency and Lawrence Livermore National Labs, an Alaska Earthquake Center field team installed two new broadband and strong motion stations at Fort Greely. According to Alaska Earthquake Center: A 2020 Perspective, “This mini-network will help assess site response issues and monitor for strong ground motion.”

The report continues, “The Fort Greely effort is going a step further by tracking the seismic frequency of ground motions. Buildings and infrastructure respond differently to low- and high-frequency vibrations. Alarms tailored to specific frequencies can differentiate damaging seismic waves from other types of vibration, such as heavy equipment working nearby.”

Sarah Lewis

The center also has partnerships directly with private entities. For example, it has a longstanding relationship with Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. “We operate a dedicated seismic monitor at each one of the pump stations,” West says. When an earthquake occurs, the Alaska Earthquake Center has specific protocols to contact Alyeska with information about the quake. “If you’re an engineer who is charged with overseeing a section of the pipeline, you don’t really care if there was a magnitude 5 earthquake 50 miles away or a magnitude 8 earthquake 300 miles away—all you care about is that piece of critical infrastructure that you’re in charge of,” West says.

Based on the information the center provides, Alyeska will then prioritize its inspection activities, ranging from immediately scheduling a helicopter to fly to the site to making note that that section of pipeline should be given extra attention during the next routine inspection.

The Alaska Earthquake Center entered another partnership in 2020 with Donlin Gold, which provided financial support for the center to acquire a USArray station approximately 6 miles from the proposed Donlin Gold mine site. In May of 2020, the Alaska Earthquake Center began operating the station, reporting on earthquake activity in the vicinity.

According to West, this kind of monitoring is one of the best ways for any natural resource development project to buttress itself against arguments or lawsuits that developing a project creates too much of a risk to the environment in the case of a seismic event. With site-specific data, a company can say, “It turns out a magnitude 7 earthquake shakes the ground this much. We know that because we measured it. It’s not hypothetical, we have a sensor there and we contracted the Alaska Earthquake Center to measure that for us.”

Sarah Lewis

West emphasizes that the center does not advocate for any specific project to move forward or be halted. “We do not take sides on any of these things,” he says. “We are pro data.”

He continues, “In fact, some years ago we engaged a fair amount with folks on both sides of Pebble, because I was really uncomfortable with what was showing up. [An early Pebble document] had lots of seismic stuff in it, and likewise, there was at least one or two advocacy groups out there who were attacking Pebble based on seismic data, and I would say, ‘Look guys, we don’t know much about that area. Neither claim here is accurate because we just don’t know.’ That area has been changing in recent years, and we are getting much better data now. But that is the motivation: without taking sides, let’s just deal in facts.”

Even in the face of less controversial projects, data is essential to building sound infrastructure—and not overbuilding to the point that the project is no longer economically viable. “I’m aware of one group in the state that has built an earthen dam to hold back stuff that’s not supposed to get out—that’s a technical explanation,” West laughs. “But they have to decide whether they’re building for a magnitude 6 earthquake or a magnitude 6.5 earthquake… but the costs associated with that difference can be eight figures. You may be talking tens or a hundred million dollars.”

According to West, “The modern seismic era in Alaska began—no joke—on the night of the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake. Before the 1964 earthquake there was one sensor in Sitka and there was a sensor on campus here in Fairbanks.

“To call 1964 a wake-up call would be a bit of a gross understatement,” he says. But the lesson was learned, and within hours of the quake groups of people gathered to make a plan to track aftershocks with initial temporary instrumentation.

As time has progressed, the essence of the center’s work hasn’t changed, but advances in technology and data processing tools let researchers work faster and more efficiently.

Early warning is exactly what Lapadat’s Schaible fellowship is for. According to UAF press release, “He aims to use the Global Navigation Satellite System to measure ground displacement during large earthquakes and analyze that information to quickly and precisely determine magnitude. That would allow alerts to be sent to areas where seismic waves have yet to reach. It’s a major challenge, but information delivered electronically travels faster than the surface S waves of an earthquake. That could mean seconds to minutes of advance warning of potentially disastrous shaking.”

The GI is also looking to the future at its Hyperspectral Imaging Laboratory, or HyLab, which in layman’s terms is a super awesome camera installed in a plane that takes highly advanced images chock full of information.

HyLab Director Martin Stuefer explains it better: “When you take a picture with your phone, the picture is composed of three different colors: red, green, blue. Your normal camera records three channels and composes a colorful image.

“With a hyperspectral camera, each linear scene is composed, in our case, of almost 480 individual channels. Instead of 3 colors you have 480 colors, and not just colors: it’s from visible to near infrared. So it’s not just an imaging technique—it’s more a measuring technique.”

The end “image” produced by a hyperspectral camera isn’t a single image. According to Anupma Prakash, UAF provost and executive vice chancellor, “It’s important to know you don’t get one photograph, you get hundreds of photographs for each point. It looks like a big cube, it’s tons of photographs stacked on top of each other. If you trim it down on each point, you will get hundreds of data from hundreds of images from each point. That’s why we can categorize so well what the things are. You can mark the difference between not only the rock types, but the individual minerals within a rock type.”

Prakash doesn’t reference minerals out of nowhere. As a professor of geophysics, much of her research has been done in the mining industry; the body of work she’s best known for is her research into coal mine fires around the world and working on environmental mitigation for them.

Prakash’s background in mineral mapping, remote sensing, and mining is in part what drew her to the UAF Department of Geosciences (then called the Department of Geology and Geophysics) in 2002. “[UAF] already had a strong remote sensing program that attracted me, and my interest was to build it up.

“Alaska has a wealth of data, but the magnitude of the size of Alaska is something that no one understands when you’re looking from the outside,” she says. “And the level of detail we don’t know; there’s so much area in Alaska that is unmapped, and then there is so much potential in Alaska that is untapped… you don’t realize the magnitude until you’re actually here. You read about it, but you don’t realize it.”

She felt what Alaska truly needed was better, more detailed imaging across the state, and she was instrumental in acquiring the funding to get the HyLab off the ground, applying for and receiving a National Science Foundation grant for the HyLab’s instrumentation.

“We didn’t have in-state capacity to do the measurements we needed at any time at our own convenience,” she says, so the idea was to have local capabilities and expertise in detailed mapping. The applications of that, she says, are numerous. “We have strategic minerals that are in commercial quantities that can be explored and mined.”

Prakash sees incredible potential for mining in Alaska and for the HyLab to partner with mining exploration efforts. “We know where those big mountain chains are, we know where those big deposits are,” she says. “But we don’t know what’s in at a finer scale within those deposits.”

Because the HyLab is a plane, it can gather a tremendous amount of data with an incredibly low impact on the environment, even less than ground crews traversing the terrain on foot. “We can fly missions to anywhere to map,” she says, and identify not just what is there but how much, helping to fine-tune exploration efforts.

“This instrumentation and this technology helps you in understanding your minerals at a micro scale, all the way to a large scale,” Prakash continues. “So should I mine here, should I not mine here? What’s the commercial value, what’s my return on investment? Where should I target? Those are very important questions because you don’t just go out and say, ‘I’m going to start drilling a hole here.’”

“With hyperspectral you can fly over areas without touching the surface and get a really detailed sense of what mineral is below the flight path,” Stuefer says. “You can cover large areas; you can tell a lot about the minerals you fly over—it’s probably the best tool you can imagine for remote sensing technique.”

Minerals have spectral signatures, which allows for the creation of a spectral library. “We then compare this spectral library with the data we get from airborne overflights, and we can match certain library components with our flight data to get a map of certain minerals,” he says.

But minerals are just one material that the HyLab can provide essential data for.

“Each surface has a certain spectral signature,” says Stuefer. “Soil, vegetation, or water has a certain signature, and if we look at those spectral signatures, we can see how healthy is the vegetation, or what certain stone is lying below the plain, or what’s the water quality—are there any algae in the water, or has the water changed?”

Stuefer says the HyLab was deployed for nearly 100 hours this year, gathering data that’s applicable for research in myriad areas.

The GI, through the HyLab, is the first organization in Alaska to offer hyperspectral imaging. It’s one more step in the organization’s natural evolution as it pursues the mission to “turn data and observations into information useful for state, Arctic, and national priorities.”

It certainly won’t be the last step taken as GI continues to understand Alaska.

Stuefer says, “There’s a strong interest of the University to help industry, to strengthen the economy in the state, and to strengthen the role of the University in the state.” As long as there are geophysical questions, GI will try to answer them.