The people and technology behind earthquake early warning

Lake ice covers the Growingk Glacier near Homer in November 2025. (Photo by Sarah Wilber)

Kodiak Island – Ages, eras, everywhere.

When you follow scientists in the Alaskan wilderness, you are sure to stumble upon an alder. In November, near Homer, the alders grew noticeably on the Gryungk Glacier even, with room to maneuver ourselves and our heavy packs. A few days later, on Kodiak Island, the alders were a little more rude. My fieldwork companion, University of Alaska Fairbanks doctoral student Cade Quigley, burst into another alder forest and announced that we had arrived:

“This is the last mud pie.”

I was tagging along with Quigley and fellow doctoral student Sarah Noel for a few days, gathering story ideas. Along the way, I began to realize that there might be two stories worth telling here: one about Alaska's future earthquake early warning system, and one about the people who make it possible.

Ph.D. Students Cade Quigley, left, and Sarah Noel remove sensors during a rainy day on Kodiak Island. (Photo by Sarah Wilbur)

In an alder forest in Kodiak, Quigley used his rock hammer to pick up a frozen pile of clay while holding a 6-pound seismic sensor, which is like a cross between a can of beans and a smoke alarm.

This sensor, one of 52 instruments — half in Homer, half in Kodiak — that Quigley and other Alaska Earthquake Center scientists installed a month ago, now contains data from about a thousand earthquakes in south-central Alaska that occurred from early October to mid-November 2025.

Working with project leader and Alaska Earthquake Center Director Michael West, Quigley arranged these new sensors in two arrays, specifically designed to measure potentially devastating offshore earthquakes in Alaska. It is an essential step in implementing an earthquake early warning system in Alaska.

A seismic sensor rests in a “mud pie” on Kodiak Island in September 2025. (Photo by Cady Quigley) University of Alaska Fairbanks doctoral student Cady Quigley holds a newly discovered seismic sensor on Kodiak in November 2025. (Photo by Sarah Wilber)

In the future, Alaskans may receive messages through the ShakeAlert system, which is funded by the USGS and deployed in partnership with the Earthquake Center, part of the UAF Geophysical Institute. The system can warn people of an earthquake and expect a strong tremor within a certain number of seconds. Alaska's ShakeAlert implementation plan includes dozens of seismic arrays along its coast.

The system is already available in California, Oregon and Washington.

Compared with traditional seismometers, the array can more accurately record large earthquakes that occur along the Alaska portion of the Ring of Fire, a seismically active horseshoe-shaped belt around the Pacific Ocean.

In this region, “very large earthquakes are not just dots on a map,” Quigley said. “It's like a very large fault patch, sometimes several hundred kilometers long.” “Basically, the array can see in real time where the front of that earthquake is moving.”

With more than 40,000 earthquakes detected annually and more than 52 earthquakes exceeding magnitude 5 so far this year, the hope is that Alaskans will find the warning system useful — and that lives will be saved.

The figure shows approximately 2,700 earthquakes that occurred in south-central Alaska between September 10 and November 12, 2025. The locations of the two search sites: HOM and KOD are also shown. (Figure by Kidd Quigley)

But perhaps only a few people will stop to wonder how this hoped-for “mud pie” sensor system evolved into an arranged telephone message.

For just this small piece of the overall warning system effort, Quigley has skillfully tied together months of planning: car rentals, plane tickets, lithium battery charges, safety plans and many other large and small tasks.

Of course, field work is not limited to logistics only. As I drove back to Fairbanks, I found myself thinking about small, shared human moments: laughing while Quigley ate clam chowder with chopsticks, smiling through a day of sideways rain in Kodiak, and celebrating the blue skies after pulling the last sensor. Collectively, these moments became a counterpoint to Quigley's logistical work—a reminder that the path to earthquake early warning runs through real people.

There is a water taxi offshore near the Homer location. Each visit to the site was bookended by a trip across Kachemak Bay by taxi. (Photo by Sarah Wilbur)

What's next for Quigley now that the fieldwork is over? He will spend the next few months analyzing his sensor data with the aim of determining the optimal number and configuration of these sensors to detect marine earthquakes. And perhaps, from his warm, dry office, he will look back fondly at the sideways rain.

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