Kenai students visit quake center 10 days after big temblor

February 15, 2016

High school students from the village of Nikolaevsk visited the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute on Feb. 3, just 10 days after a major earthquake struck their region.

Photo courtesy of EarthScope National Office. Nikolaevsk students learn about real-time earthquake data while visiting the Alaska Earthquake Center.

The visit was part of a series of outreach tours for rural villagers organized by the EarthScope National Office, which UAF hosts.

Nikolaevsk is a community of about 320 people on the Kenai Peninsula. It sits about 60 miles east of the Jan. 24 Iniskin Earthquake's epicenter.

The students' visit included a tour of the Alaska Earthquake Center, a presentation by the Alaska Volcano Observatory about volcano monitoring and a demonstration of how GPS sensors monitored the Kenai Peninsula's ground movement during the earthquake.

The students, members of Nikolaevsk's basketball teams, also toured the UAF campus.

The EarthScope National Office is the hub of community engagement for the nationwide National Science Foundation-funded EarthScope project. The project is conducting a deep geoscientific exploration of the North American continent using state-of-the-art instruments and methods.

EarthScope data and instruments are the responsibility of two nonprofit university consortiums — the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology and UNAVCO, with assistance in Alaska from the Alaska Earthquake Center and Alaska Volcano Observatory.

ADDITIONAL CONTACT: Lea Gardine, Alaska Earthquake Center outreach coordinator, 907-474-7664; Maïté Agopian, EarthScope education and outreach coordinator, 907-474-2724, maite.agopian@alaska.edu.

ON THE WEB: www.earthscope.org/blog