Satellite map of the Nenana area in central Alaska showing locations for the three components of the Aug. 20, 2025, earthquake. Red markers north of Nenana identify the foreshock and very-low-frequency earthquake and the main shock location. A green marker shows the nearby NEA2 seismic station.
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A whisper from within

July 27, 2026
An unusual signal seconds ahead of an Alaska earthquake could help solve a seismic mystery
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Part of Fourth Avenue in downtown Anchorage lies collapsed after subsiding nearly 11 feet during the 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake, with damaged buildings, cars and trucks visible along the broken street.
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A history of Alaska's seismic monitoring

June 30, 2026
Tracking Alaska's ground motion started with a single station installed in 1904. A second station was established in Fairbanks in 1935.
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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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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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A glacier goes on the run in Greenland

May 28, 2025
Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland is one of Earth’s fastest-moving glaciers and one of the Greenland Ice Sheet’s largest glaciers. It produces...
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The train of 10 snowmachines snaked slowly across the snow-covered Arctic Ocean ice toward the small tent far ahead, a single drop of yellow paint on a textured white canvas whose edges couldn’t be seen. This place, just a few miles from the northernmost U.S. city of Utqiagvik, is a good place for the collection of University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists and technicians collecting data for the Lightweight Airborne Snow and Sea Ice Thickness Observing System, or LASSITOS, project.
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Frozen ocean, solid science

May 8, 2025
The train of 10 snowmachines snaked slowly across the snow-covered Arctic Ocean ice toward the small tent far ahead, a single drop of yellow...
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Into the hot zone by drone

April 11, 2025
Using unmanned aircraft to efficiently and safely measure soil gas emissions in potentially risky areas of an active volcano has great potential...
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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

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