New funding provides early earthquake warning in Alaska

Alaska is closer to the critical seconds warning that tremors from a major earthquake are about to occur.

Federal funding approved earlier this year will allow the first implementation steps of the ShakeAlert system to begin, although it is not expected to be operational for several years and is contingent on continued financial support. The system can provide several seconds to a minute or more of warning and is used in California, Oregon and Washington.

The Alaska Earthquake Center of the Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute will work on the implementation with the USGS. The USGS published its Technical Implementation Plan for Alaska in February 2025.

At least $2 million of the $34.9 million Congress appropriated will go to the USGS to further develop and expand ShakeAlert toward adding Alaska to the system. Efforts will first focus on the Anchorage, Fairbanks, Kodiak and Prince William Sound regions, which are home to about 90% of the state’s population.

“This is great news for Alaska,” said Michael West, state seismologist and director of the Alaska Earthquake Center. “Establishing earthquake early warning in Alaska has been a long-term joint effort between the Alaska Earthquake Center and our partners at the USGS.”

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski helped obtain the funding, West said.

“I thank Senator Murkowski for her efforts over the years that have brought us to this starting point,” West said. “It is time to build on this capacity that exists in other West Coast states.”

Murkowski is the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. She is chair of the subcommittee of that committee with jurisdiction over the USGS.

“When earthquakes happen, seconds matter,” Murkowski said. “The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning System provides life-saving tools that detect earthquakes in real time and issue alerts throughout the danger zone.”

The USGS developed ShakeAlert in partnership with researchers at the University of California, Berkeley; California Institute of Technology; and University of Washington.

“Earthquake early warning is mostly an engineering problem,” said Ronnie Grabenthen, a UAF professor, who has been involved in earthquake early warning for several years. “We take what we can learn about earthquakes, and try to accelerate it.”

As a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, Grapenthen helped integrate real-time GPS into a prototype system, parts of which evolved into ShakeAlert.

“There has been a lot of development, and there are still new developments,” he added.

Most early warning systems use a network of seismic sensors to detect an earthquake’s fast-moving primary waves, or P waves. P wave signals are automatically collected when their arrival times to sensors form a pattern consistent with a single earthquake.

The system then quickly estimates the location and magnitude of the earthquake. This allows alerts to be sent before the slower, more damaging secondary waves, or S waves, arrive.

P waves are fast-moving waves that push and pull on the ground in the same direction as the wave travels, allowing them to move through solids, liquids and gases. Slower S waves move the Earth perpendicular to the path of the waves.

Earthquake early warning systems also include GNSS receivers to quickly characterize large earthquakes and their extent. The Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), which includes the Global Positioning System (GPS), uses satellites to measure surface displacements, which are often several meters for the largest earthquakes.

How and when ShakeAlert will arrive in Alaska and what it will look like is not yet clear. Participants will evaluate cost, population and infrastructure at risk, warning times required, logistics and maintenance, and the seismic environment of the region.

“We’re not starting from scratch,” Grabenthen said. “We have a lot of geophysical instruments in the field that transmit data in real time, but the demand for robust data transmission is much higher for an earthquake warning system than for a system that locates earthquakes after they happen.”

The Alaska system will consist of 450 National Advanced Real-Time Seismic System stations. Of these, 20 are existing in the state, 270 are new stations and 160 are upgrades of existing stations.

The cost of completing this phase is estimated at approximately $66 million in 2024 dollars. The cost of the operation is estimated at approximately $12 million annually.

“Going forward, state investment is critical,” West said. “States are best positioned to lead public awareness campaigns and integrate earthquake alerts with state and local emergency management systems.”

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