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Three missions, four rockets: Poker Flat is ready for launch

January 29, 2026
The 2026 Poker Flat Research Range launch season opens late Thursday night, Jan. 29, with the first of three missions studying the aurora and the...
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Discussion in a tent at a remote lake led to a new look at Alaska tectonic activity 75 million to 50 million years ago, a period spanning the Late Cretaceous through the early Paleogene. The two geologists determined that the concurrent events of the Western Alaska rotation and Southeast Alaska metamorphism from the addition of crust created the curvature seen today — an orocline in geologic terms. It can be seen in the arc of the Alaska Range mountains, Wrangell Mountains and St. Elias Mountains and the southern coastline.
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A new view of old Alaska

January 9, 2026
Discussion in a tent at a remote lake led to a new look at Alaska tectonic activity 75 million to 50 million years ago, a period spanning the...
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Changing channels

November 26, 2025
Far up in Alaska, between 64.593 degrees north latitude and 66.870 degrees, sit 11 research sites emblematic of the wide-scale change being...
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Plumbing for answers to an Alaska volcano mystery

October 9, 2025
Mount Edgecumbe volcano in Southeast Alaska sits in a place where a volcano shouldn’t really be sitting. Research underway with new federal...
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Unstable ground

September 16, 2025
Point Lay, Alaska, has been at its current site since 1980, but change has followed. The land beneath the people and their homes is shifting and...
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New eyes on our planet

August 1, 2025
UAF's Alaska Satellite Facility has a key role in revolutionary U.S.-India Earth-observing mission. The joint satellite mission of NASA and the...
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Tiny crystals give insight to major eruption

July 23, 2025
Knowledge about Mount Augustine volcano’s past is key for understanding its next unrest — and it will erupt again. Its history says so. And...
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UAF graduate student researcher Kylee Branning was one of two people inside a windowless 40-foot shipping container converted into a high-tech science observatory near the southern edge of frozen Lake Torneträsk, Sweden’s sixth-largest.
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Snow, cold, reindeer and long hours

June 2, 2025
Wind blew viciously across this isolated spot of northern Sweden on Feb. 1, 2024, driving the snow near horizontal. Gusts of 30 to 40 mph whipped...
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A new and unique system of mini-observatories, which began operating in late 2024, allows scientists to map vastly larger areas of the far upper atmosphere while also providing greater detail.
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Wind at the edge of space

June 1, 2025
A new and unique system of mini-observatories, which began operating in late 2024, allows scientists to map vastly larger areas of the far upper...
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About

Since it was established by an Act of Congress in 1946, scientists at the Geophysical Institute have studied geophysical processes from the center of the Earth to the surface of the sun and beyond, turning data and observations into information useful for state, Arctic and national priorities.

Contact info

The GI is located on the West Ridge of the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus.

2156 Koyukuk Drive
University of Alaska Fairbanks
Fairbanks, AK 99775

We acknowledge the Alaska Native nations upon whose ancestral lands our campuses reside. In Fairbanks, our Troth Yeddha' Campus is located on the ancestral lands of the Dena people of the lower Tanana River.

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©2025 Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks.