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Waiting to fail

May 6, 2026
Research about 2025 Alaska landslide and tsunami warns that more are coming
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Three bundled researchers work at a snow-covered permafrost coring site in a boreal forest near Fairbanks under a bright, low winter sun. From left, Louise Farquharson of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, and Shannon Hibbard and Jennifer Kielhofer, both of the Desert Research Institute, operate coring equipment beside a dug trench, with shovels, packs and field gear spread across the snow in the Goldstream Creek area on March 23, 2026.
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Reading the permafrost

May 4, 2026
Scientists want to understand how people can adapt to, and plan for, a warming Arctic.
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Poker Flat Research Range cleans up what comes down

March 25, 2026
The launch site’s recovery program goes to great lengths to retrieve payloads and rocket parts — or as many as can be found in its expansive...
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Description of three sounding-rocket missions launching four rockets from Poker Flat Research Range near Fairbanks between Jan. 30 and Feb. 10. The launches occurred within just four available launch days, showing the team’s efficiency and success.
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Launches x4: Multiple missions kept everyone busy at Poker Flat

February 12, 2026
Three missions with four rockets were sent skyward in an unusually short timespan at Poker Flat Research Range. That's a big success for the...
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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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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.