Test setting of an earthquake early warning array

Kodiak Island, Alaska – 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 accompanied Quigley and fellow doctoral student Sarah Noel for a few days (Figure 1), 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 the other about the people who make it possible.

Short-term seismic nodes

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 (Figure 2), which resembles a marriage 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 (Figure 3).

The Kodiak field site at the Pacific Spaceport Complex was chosen for its ease of logistics and proximity to a seismic-producing offshore subduction zone; However, this also meant that the crew had to wait until the end of the summer rocket launching season to deploy.

Matrices test

Working with project leader and Alaska Earthquake Center Director Michael West, Quigley arranged these new sensors into two arrays (Figures 3 and 4), specifically designed to — hopefully — better capture potentially devastating offshore earthquakes in Alaska. The deployments are part of a USGS-funded study to test the design and feasibility of small-scale seismic arrays as part of Alaska's earthquake early warning system.

In the future, Alaskans may receive messages through the ShakeAlert system, which can warn people of an earthquake and to 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.”

Such arrays are being tested elsewhere, but Alaska's high level of seismic activity makes it an ideal testing ground. The Alaska Earthquake Center handles up to 40,000 earthquakes each year, usually magnitude 5 or more per week. “How can we get the most accurate locations with the fewest stations possible?” Quigley said this research aims to address this question. The hope is that Alaskans will find the warning system useful to help prevent loss.

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. The Homer Array took over the bulk of the planning, with the help of fellow seismologist Casey Aderhold, a project manager at the EarthScope Consortium who lives in Homer. Aderhold suggested the location of Grewingk Glacier and re-explored the area to see if it could host the array.

Human moments

Of course, field work is not limited to logistics only. As I drove back to Fairbanks, I found myself thinking about small, common human moments: laughing at Quigley eating clam chowder with chopsticks, smiling through a day of sideways rain in Kodiak and celebrating the blue skies after pulling the last sensor (Figure 5). Collectively, these moments became a counterpoint to Quigley's logistical work—a reminder that the path to earthquake early warning runs through real people.

What's next for Quigley now that the fieldwork is over? It will spend the next few months analyzing its sensor data with the aim of determining the optimal number and configuration of these sensors for detecting marine earthquakes (Figure 4). And perhaps, from his warm, dry office, he will look back fondly at the sideways rain.

This insight was contributed to the Alaska Earthquake Center fieldwork by Sarah Wilbur, communications coordinator at the Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, who joined Alaska Earthquake Center graduate students on their final mission of the season. The story has been slightly modified from the original story published on December 4, 2025.

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