The world of earthquakes moves after 30 years Alaska Science Forum

One Sunday more than 20 years ago, Natalia Robert held her 1-year-old son tightly in her arms. A friend's house began shaking with a force you had never felt before.

Her son Anton laughed and thought it was fun. Robert, who was only a year into her career as a seismologist, handed the boy over to her husband.

“I have to go to the office,” Robert told him.

The 2002 Denali earthquake would have a profound impact on the career of Russian-born Robert, who is now moving on after 30 years at the Alaska Earthquake Center in Fairbanks to a new job in the Pacific Northwest.

At the time, Robert had only a few years to arrive in Fairbanks from Novosibirsk, Russia, where she grew up and went to college.

In the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union disintegrated into 15 independent countries, this educated Russian woman in her 20s was suddenly able to travel as much as she wanted.

Robert took advantage of this freedom by applying to study at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Soon I arrived here to start working on my Masters degree at the Geophysical Institute with the late Professor Niren Biswas.

“(Being a Russian scientist in the United States) was something new at the time, but I received a good education despite all the problems in the Soviet Union,” she said during a recent interview.

Robert has worked on locating earthquakes on the Kenai Peninsula and the Cook Inlet area. I became instantly addicted to earthquakes.

“I started to love Alaska and the international students here. I loved my new friends and my research.

Her interests coincided with the period of growth of the Alaska Earthquake Center at the Geophysical Institute. She stayed with the organization — whose scientists install and maintain the instruments, as well as record earthquakes and inform people of their location and magnitude — and earned her Ph.D.

Over the years, Robert has drilled holes in Alaska, helped install seismometers, analyzed mountains of data in the laboratory, traveled around the world attending conferences and consulting with colleagues, and conducted research on events such as the Denali earthquake.

She is the author or co-author of dozens of different papers on the 7.9 magnitude earthquake that left a 180-mile-long scar across the glacial ice and forest floor across central Alaska. While no one died during the earthquake of November 3, 2002, many scientists became interested in a massive event that intersected three Alaska highways and was fairly easy to study.

That quake, during which the Trans-Alaska Pipeline slid sideways on long beams recommended by seismologists during construction, inspired officials from Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. to recruit staff from the Alaska Earthquake Center to upgrade its earthquake detection system.

“Such a big project put us on the map,” she said.

Robert believes her work as a seismologist in Alaska may have been an advantage for women in science 30 years ago, when most of her colleagues were men.

“There was no discrimination here, I was always treated equally,” she said. “When I gave a presentation somewhere else, some people would approach me and say, ‘Wow, great, you’re a geologist over there.’ But I didn’t think about those things. I just did it because I loved learning about earthquakes.”

The biggest challenge, she said, was raising two young boys (Anton and Daniel, both now in their 20s) while working as seismologists. She credits her husband, engineer Artem Robert, for supporting her when she travels for work or needs to spend extra time in the office.

She has now applied for and been accepted for a new job elsewhere. In December 2024, Robert will begin working on the USGS ShakeAlert program.

She will lead a team of scientists in California, Oregon and Washington, who will provide real-time alerts to people after an earthquake. These text messages are an early warning that gives people up to a minute or so to prepare for the next earthquake. The researchers envision automated messages that could slow trains, close water valves, or turn on backup generators before the ground starts shaking.

“This is the future,” Robert said of the systems currently in place in Japan and other countries with a dense network of seismometers. “Every time you give a public presentation, people ask you if we can predict earthquakes.

“We can't predict it, but we can detect it very quickly,” she said.

Robert will be the Vibration Alerts Coordinator for the entire Pacific Northwest.

She said: “It is a big and important program, and it is also an opportunity for me to do something new, and a new challenge for me.”

Her new job will require a move to Seattle from Fairbanks, where she has lived for more years than she has in her native Russia.

Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute has provided this column for free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell [email protected] is a science writer at the Geophysical Institute.

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