Alaska hosts research:

Discovery

West

Busby

Alaska averages 40,000 earthquakes per year, with more large quakes than the other 49 states combined, and America’s shakiest state is about to have its ground examined like never before.

A federal agency that supports basic science research is completing installation in Alaska of an array of seismometers as part of its quest to map the Earth’s upper crust beneath North America.

When the magnitude 9.2 Great Alaska Earthquake ripped through the state in 1964, there were two seismometers in Alaska. At the end of this summer, there will be 260, swathing the state with instruments that record seismic waves and give geologists a picture of the upper 50 miles (80 kms) of the Earth. Alaska state seismologist Michael West calls it a “big freaking deal.”

“This footprint of instrumentation rolled across the country and is now wrapping up this grand, 15year project” in Alaska, West said. The seismographs are deployed for the National Science Foundation by a consortium of US universities that acquires and distributes seismological data.

Engineering them for Alaska was a challenge.

A helicopter flies in a lightweight drill rig to dig into bedrock or permafrost for the seismograph, said Bob Busby, transportable array manager for Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology.

Solar panels mounted on fiberglass huts must gather energy throughout summer to charge lithium iron phosphate batteries — equivalent to two or three batteries in a Prius — that power equipment through the long winter.

The array of seismometers, part of the science foundation’s EarthScope project, has the ambitious goal of explaining how continents formed as well as something of more immediately interest: where dangerous earthquakes of the future may occur.

It’s tied to the theory of plate tectonics, which holds that Earth’s rigid outer layer is broken into large, mobile plates, like pieces of