Among the attendees to the 2025 Arctic Encounter Summit in Anchorage were leaders from the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, Alaska's largest research institute.
The GI, as it's known, boasted revenue in excess of $100 million for fiscal year 2024, mostly from federal research grants. Its researchers study everything from seismology -- including the magnitude 8.8 earthquake that struck Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula -- to volcanoes, the aurora, permafrost, climate change and much more.
Geophysical Institute Director Bob McCoy says the GI plays an important role in interdisciplinary studies, bringing researchers together under one roof. But McCoy says collaboration with Russian scientists, in particular, has been nonexistent of late.
Below is the transcript of an interview with McCoy on Alaska News Nightly. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Bob McCoy: As you can imagine, earthquakes and volcanoes, they don't care about national boundaries. So Kamchatka has as a lot of volcanoes, a lot of earthquakes, and faculty and staff and the GI students used to work quite closely with with Russians in Kamchatka. But now, since the Ukraine invasion, that's all come to a halt. We're all waiting for that to end, and we'll get back collaborating again in all those areas.
Casey Grove: What do you think is lost in that?
BM: Quite a bit. There's an interesting phenomenon in Siberia, these holes opening up, 50 meter diameter explosions from methane released in permafrost. And the Russians are pretty concerned about this. They reached out to some of our faculty in the GI, several of our permafrost experts have an idea what's happening and where it's happening, and we were building a collaboration just before the invasion. So that's on hold. Those holes might be happening in Canada and Alaska, and so we're anxious to coordinate again to get a better idea. That's just one example, but lots of areas we (used to) collaborate.
CG: So you're here for the Arctic Encounter Summit, and why? I mean, what are you talking to folks about? And what are you hearing?
BM: Well, it's kind of an exciting time. I look forward to this every year. This year, people from 27 nations showed up. There's ambassadors, there's scientists, there's politicians, military. And so all these people interested in the Arctic. It's a chance to network, to hear about common concerns, about the Arctic, about what's changing in the Arctic, and what it's like to live in the Arctic, and talk about the future of the Arctic. So it's kind of an exciting conference. It's it's great.
CG: Speaking of cooperation and the importance of working together, if you go to the the website for the Geophysical Institute, you'll notice pretty quickly that there are many different fields of study incorporated in that institute, in that building. I mean, it's, you know, permafrost research, space physics research, volcanology, earthquakes, all kinds of things. And, you know, I wonder, coming from you, how do you see the importance of having everybody in that same building there?
BM: Yeah, so I like to say we're strongly a function of where we are in Alaska and in the Arctic, and we're at the intersection of the Ring of Fire and the auroral oval. So it's great having so many disciplines in one unit. When something happens, we can call on different disciplines: tectonics, sedimentation, seismology. You need scientists from several disciplines that look at the entire effect. And so it's been great having so many under one roof, that we can quickly coordinate.
CG: Well, maybe this is the part where I have to say, you know, in the spirit of full disclosure, I was a student assistant in the Information Office there 20 years ago. But I remember people sort of just bumping into each other in the hallways and talking or being interested in what each other was reading. And I wonder, is that the same now? I mean, I feel like we live in kind of a different world where there's more Zoom meetings and things like that. Do you think that?
BM: Yeah, we're a lot bigger. We've grown a lot. There's about 460 of us faculty and staff and students. So it takes seminars and things like that to really, you know, to have a space seminar which attracts the the seismologist or vice versa. The atmospheric scientists come down to hear something about volcanoes. Something exciting happens, like the earthquake in Russia or the one south of Sand Point, that people are usually curious. So that's a way to talk about collaboration.
CG: Speaking of growing, too, I've heard that the funding situation for the GI, as it's called, has grown significantly under your tenure. I wondered about the, I guess, the ability of the GI to sort of diversify its funding sources. Has that helped, sort of — I've heard people describe it as, like, you know, it's "recession proof."
BM: Yeah, we've been growing. You know, the university had some budget cuts about five years ago. And since we're mostly federal funding, that's worked in our favor. Last year, we had a small activity in tectonic and sedimentation with minerals, and so there's a growing interest in critical minerals. So we created the Alaska Critical Minerals Collaborative, and we partnered across campus, but we also partnered with other other other universities, like UAA and UAS, and with industry. So being big, we can start new initiatives.
And we've taken on several facilities. We're about to take on a National Science Foundation radar at Poker Flat (Research Range), Incoherent Scatter Radar. We're about to take responsibility for operating that radar. So being being big and having a lot of people being able to collaborate really, really helps.
CG: So, you know, I wanted to ask you about the current presidential administration and things that we've heard about funding being cut to research on climate change and research by more racially diverse scientists. Have you seen that at the GI, and what do you think about that?
BM: We've seen it. We've been affected only minimally. Some of our educational programs have been, look like, they're going to be terminated. But most of what we do, like I said, is tied to hazards: volcanoes, earthquakes, space weather. Space weather is a hazard. And we do a lot of support for the Department of Defense.
We're a little confused by what's happening. Things haven't settled out but things like Golden Dome, hypersonic missile launch, critical minerals, and even the overall interest in the Arctic, we're in a good position for all those things. So I'm quietly optimistic that we'll be able to pivot and continue to grow.
CG: I guess funding for defense-related projects has always sort of been a thing for the Geophysical Institute. And you mentioned that, too. I mean, what sort of proportion of the GI's funding comes from, like, defense-related projects and do you think that some researchers, you know, have second thoughts about that?
BM: Yeah, potentially. It turns out, the GI was created in 1946 by Congress, mainly because of the the Aurora and effects on DoD systems being able to communicate. So it's always been part of our culture. The amount of DoD funding has been minimal, but nobody has to work with the DoD if they don't want to.
But it turns out, everything we do is of interest. We're monitoring earthquakes. We're trying to understand all the (seismic) faults in Alaska, but that's also important to places like Fort Greely and Eielson (Air Force Base) and Joint Base Elmendorf (Richardson). So it's easy for us just to share that information. When there's a volcanic eruption, when ash goes up 35,000, 40,000 feet, that affects air traffic. It affects the DoD. So there's so little infrastructure in Alaska that we get called upon a lot to help help the Department of Defense with wildfires, or when they find a plane that's crashed in a glacier 70 years ago. Our glacier experts can tell them, "Hey, that glacier is moving a certain way."
So basically, we do what we've always done. We're not starting new DoD disciplines. We're just taking geophysics and using to support the DoD. So that's been very natural.
CG: I wanted to ask you, too, and I know this is like kind of a specific slice of that, but what role does the GI play in monitoring for rocket launches or missile launches from nuclear-armed countries like Russia?
BM: In the GI, we have something called the Wilson Alaska Technical Center. They are a group that started developing infrasound capabilities, listening at frequencies below what your ears can hear. People can't hear it. Those loud sounds at those frequencies propagate all over the world. So as our guys developed a capability, several years ago, they formed this center, and then about seven years ago, we became a UARC: a University Affiliated Research Center and got extra attention from the GI doing what we always do.
But we have a network now of infrasound stations. We have one (near) the South Pole, at McMurdo Station. And it turns out that's a really good example of dual use. Infrasound is great for listening for volcanoes. We can't monitor every volcano, but we listen with infrasound. But we're also listening for loud sounds. And so volcanoes or nuclear atmospheric bursts, those are two kinds of loud sounds that we can hear with our network. So it's sort of evolved, doing what we always do. And so that's been a successful model for us.
CG: I think the last time I read about this, there was certifications and things going on to turn Poker Flat into a space port. Where is that at this point?
BM: Sure. So Alaska Aerospace Corporation, they operate in Kodiak, the Pacific Spaceport Complex Alaska. And when they created Alaska Aerospace in state law, (there were) a lot of references to the Geophysical Institute. And we have a rocket range. We've been launching rockets since 1969, sometimes for the DoD, but mostly NASA. And right now we have a contract with NASA, so we formed a partnership with Kodiak and the ranges in the Lower 48, rocket ranges, either sub-orbital, which is a sounding rocket — rockets go up and come back down — or orbital.
They're all getting pretty full, but Kodiak's got some availability, and so does Poker. So we're partnering. John Oberst is the CEO (of Alaska Aerospace). He and I are partnering between our two rocket ranges. We signed a (memorandum of understanding) to expand the original intent of the state law, and we're reaching out to people. So for example, usually NASA launches rockets at our range. They launch into the aurora. They head north. We go up, sometimes pretty high, 1,700 kilometers up, sometimes all the way out in the Arctic Ocean. But we're doing those for science. But there's a lot of developers now building rockets, these small rockets. And sometimes they want to recover them. And if you launch out of Kodiak, it goes in the ocean. But if you launch out of Poker, in principle, you can put a parachute on it.
So this partnership is now three ways. It's Alaska Aerospace, the Geophysical Institute and NASA, NASA Wallops Flight Center. And now the Department Defense is getting involved, too, because they want to enhance launch opportunities for small rockets. So it's a, sort of, a four-way partnership, which, I think it's going to be good for us and for NASA and for Alaska Aerospace.
CG: When you walked in, I don't know if you noticed, we have a very impressive satellite dish here on our roof and some antennas and stuff, but it's nothing compared to the dish on top of the Elvey Building there for the Geophysical Institute. Do you hear from people in the community about just the iconic dish itself and what it represents?
BM: So that dish is owned by NASA and and we have a contract with them, the Alaska Satellite Facility. Turns out we have a dozen dishes, and that dish is a 9-meter, BUT we have 11-meter dishes. Down the road, near Badger Road, we have an 11-meter dish.
So we pull down a lot of NASA data from NASA satellites, especially radar, synthetic aperture radar, data. So that blue dish you're talking about, it's actually been replaced. It's fairly new. We took the old one down and put up a new one. It's an icon. You can see it anywhere in Fairbanks. I tell people, "Come to the building with the blue dish. That's where I live." And so we do a lot of radar, like I said, synthetic aperture radar data analysis for NASA and for the Department of Defense, from commercial satellites.
But a new satellite that we're pretty excited about is NISAR. It's an acronym for "NASA-ISRO." That's the Indian Space Research Organization. That satellite's going to be a synthetic aperture radar satellite. It's going to generate 50 petabytes a year. And a petabyte's 1,000 terabytes. A terabyte's, 1,000 gigabytes. That's more data than any satellite's ever generated. So we've been holding our breath for years. So it launched out of India. So we had 100 people downstairs in the Alaska Satellite Facility all excited, and so we're gonna have access to all that data.
And Fairbanks is a great place to download data. We have several of our own dishes. We work with the Space Force. We work with the Navy. And we do a lot of commercial stuff. We work with NOAA. We pull down NOAA data from NOAA polar-orbiting satellites.
Polar-orbiting satellites, if you want to image the earth, you got to go to polar orbit, and you look down, and you'll see everywhere (on Earth) in a couple days. So those polar-orbiting satellites, they orbit the earth about 14 times a day, but 11 or 12 of those orbits are right over Fairbanks, so it's a great place. We have all these satellite dishes. We pull down the data process and send it out.
