A map and overview of all Fairbanks campus projects is here.

For more information about projects at UAF, call 474-7000. Information about public road construction is available from the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities at www.alaskanavigator.org.

Yukon Drive — Sidewalk installation on both sides of the road; some sewer work in front of Moore-Bartlett-Skarland. Closed from Chandalar Drive to Sheenjek Drive through mid-July. The shuttle bus will use North Tanana Loop to access MBS and Cutler, Reichardt, and West Ridge. The museum can be reached from North Tanana Loop and from the west end of Tanana Loop until mid-July, after which the west end of Yukon Drive will be limited to one lane, and the museum can be reached from the east side of Yukon. The project is expected to be substantially completed by early August.

The UAF shuttle and MACS, the borough bus, will continue to use the stop on the north side of Wood Center during the project.

A simplified map of the road closure and alternate routes is here.

Ballaine parking lot — Resurfacing; electrical upgrades. Closed for the summer starting in mid- to late June. The Taku lot will remain open, as will pedestrian access from Taku to the stairs at the bottom of the hill.

Eielson Building, first floor — New hallway carpet; some office construction/refurbishing. Work is expected to begin in late June or early July. The hallway will remain open, but use caution when moving through the area.

Lola Tilly — Reroofing; foundation/sidewalk repairs. Work will continue most of the summer. The sidewalks immediately adjacent to the building will remain closed, but pedestrians can continue to use nearby sidewalks.

The Pub — New flooring. Closed for the summer starting June 25.

University Park — Construction; refurbishing. Work is not expected to begin until July.

A number of other, smaller projects will take place in many buildings this summer, most of them for renovation or structural improvements. The activities are not expected to have a significant impact on the university community or public.

Renovation and repair work will also be done at the following sites:

• Chukchi Campus
• Community and Technical College (downtown building and garage)
• Matanuska Experiment Farm
• Northwest Campus
• Seward Marine Center

I’m inside a silent, pitch-black room, being stalked by a relentless cartoon moose.

The ungulate slowly materializes out of the darkness to my left, vanishing as soon as it catches my eye. It reappears behind me, accompanied by the sound of footsteps, then to my right, highlighted by a glow from above. Every time, seconds after I turn to spot him, the moose disappears.

Ten feet away, outside the confines of my virtual reality headset and headphones, recent University of Alaska Fairbanks graduate Tristan Craddick watches patiently. Craddick is demonstrating his senior Honors Program thesis: a clever test to determine the most effective way to direct someone’s gaze in a VR world.

“I wanted to look and see whether, in a virtual reality environment, audio cues or visual cues are more effective at directing a user’s attention,” said Craddick, who was selected as UAF’s 2018 outstanding student in computer science.

“If you were to take traditional film or game design, the director always has control over where the camera is pointing, and that’s where the viewer is looking. In virtual reality, you can’t manipulate the camera … so that poses a challenge of how to direct the user toward a particular element of your scene you want them to see.”

Craddick got the idea for the thesis while working as a student assistant for the National Science Foundation’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. He used EPSCoR’s visualization development space on UAF’s West Ridge, which includes two full VR setups.

Craddick said despite the growing interest in VR technology, he couldn’t locate much existing research regarding ways to make it more user-friendly.

“One of the ideas that kept coming about was how to make the technology be more accessible for people, how to make it more intuitive for people to use,” he said. “One way to do that is through proper software design, but there really isn’t a lot of consensus on the proper techniques.”

So Craddick designed an experiment. He built a virtual room with an object (the moose) that slowly materializes at random out of the participant’s view, either accompanied by a steadily brightening light, the sound of footsteps or no cue at all. As soon as the participant looks at the moose for two seconds, it vanishes and reappears again. The process repeats 30 times, and the person’s response times are recorded.

Craddick planned to run the experiment on 100 volunteers, but discovered he didn’t need to. “I had a lot of issues trying to get people to participate, unfortunately,” he said. “I was still far away from the 100 participants I was originally going for, but when I was analyzing my data, I realized I already had enough to come to some conclusive results.”

As it turned out, the audio cues won by a significant margin. On average, participants found the moose in 4.8 seconds when they heard the footsteps, versus about 6.5 seconds for both the light cue and the control group. That’s a 29 percent difference.

Craddick said it would have been possible to improve the performance of the visual cues by making them more obvious — say, a flashing arrow — but that’s not the point.

“With virtual reality, part of the focus of design is immersion — you don’t really want to make them think, oh yeah, I’m wearing a headset, this is all just some type of software,” he noted. “You want to make them think they’re in the scene.”

Craddick turned his findings into a four-page thesis, which he and his advisor, associate professor of computer science Orion Lawlor, hope to have published. He also made a research poster, which he presented to the Honors Program and at the UAF Research and Creative Activity Day.

Meanwhile, Craddick is furthering both his career and his education: he will intern this summer with Coupi, Inc., a Fairbanks firm that makes software to model granular materials for industry simulations. He’ll be back on campus in the fall to begin a master’s degree in computer science, which will continue to focus on computer graphics.

All of a sudden, we are again the land of no night. Summer happens every year, but it is always a surprise. Maybe because winter is the normal state of middle Alaska, with a white ground surface possible from late September until late April.

Over the years, I have marked this frenetic, green time by slaving my body clock to the circling sun and trying to stay awake at least once for 24 hours. Races are a convenient way to do this. This year, there was one on the calendar I could not resist.

The Alaska Endurance Trail Run is a six-mile loop through my backyard, the North Campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The North Campus is 1,100 acres of boreal forest, cleared fields and a few lakes owned by the university. It’s a rectangle of land with perfect ski trails in the winter and a few semi-dry running and walking loops in the summer.

Though we are still a few weeks from our deepest nod toward the sun (summer solstice will happen at 2:07 a.m. Alaska time on June 21), race organizer Don Kiely knew darkness would be a memory in Fairbanks on the race day, June 1.

“This is the land of the midnight sun, so leave your headlamps at home!” he wrote on the description for the race, which attracted 15 people for the 24-hour option. They would see how far they could go on foot from 8 p.m. Friday to 8 p.m. Saturday.

At the race’s darkest point — about 2 a.m. Saturday — I rammed a spruce root with my big toe and wondered if a headlamp would have been a good idea. The sun had set at midnight, dropping behind the green hills almost dead north of us. It would pop over the treetops again at 3:30 a.m., just 24 degrees to the east of pure north.

For that fleeting few hours, Fairbanks experienced civil twilight, when the sun bobbed less than 6 degrees below the northern horizon. Civil twilight provides enough lumens to read a book outside, pull weeds in your garden or anticipate bumps on a path of sodden wood chips. It does not allow you to see aurora or stars. They will be back soon enough.

I reached my jogger’s low point at the time I expected, during the dimmest part of the day/night. The body’s mysterious requirement for sleep (scientists still don’t know why we need eight hours) was most noticeable at that time. I fantasized about tucking into the little cabin on my property, 200 steps from the trail, and yanking a sleeping bag from its stuffsack.

But, as Kiely had reminded us at the start, we could sleep every other night. The point here was to endure, to push through those learned habits and see where it took us. We knew it would take us over the same earthy-smelling 6-mile loop, for as many revolutions as we could complete in 24 hours.

That concept seemed dreadful at times — for me before the race and then on my second lap, when my legs reminded me I had not trained and, oh, there were 22 hours to go.

However, much like life outside the sporting realm, extra-long events are a roller-coaster of highs and lows. Some pains can be ignored or ibuprophened into numbness. A good moment is just around that tree, or maybe beyond that hill.

At 3:30 a.m., the sun rose, bathing the snowy peaks of the Alaska Range red. An hour later, splotches of sunlight penetrated the spruce, striking my shirt and warming my heart, resetting the circadian clock that tunes our bodies to a 24-hour day. I felt good: Hey, I’m supposed to be awake now!

It’s true that the scenery never changed in those 24 hours, but no 6-mile lap was the same. The quality of light was always changing, from warm and bold at 8:30 p.m. to shadowy and so-chilly-your-hands-didn’t-work at 4 a.m.

In 70-degree heat of 2 p.m., winds combing the tall spruce pulled down curtains of pollen, tiny yellow orbs that hold the male genetic material of the tree. Though they dust car windshields with a mustard-colored film, those grains don’t bother allergy sufferers as much as birch pollen, composed of more irritating proteins.

Leaves of deciduous trees were fully unfolded, gorgeous neon green and not yet stenciled by insects. In the breeze, Populus tremuloides lived up to its name, shimmering with a sound like the sea. In a few weeks, the aspen leaf miners will turn many of those leaves into silver potato chips.

At a bend of the trail near the Potato Field, we entered a pool of air that smelled like honey. A flowering chokecherry tree blooms there, amid a half-dozen boreal forest species. Like all the chokecherries in Alaska, this one has been imported to this spot. Its location in the forest suggests the tree’s seed might have been deposited by a Bohemian waxwing that swallowed frozen berries on a dark December day and perched on a nearby branch.

Throughout the day, but especially late and early, the summer visitors to North Campus were making themselves heard. There was the Hammond’s flycatcher from Honduras, squeaking out its song in an aspen near the Bicycle Bumps. And the Townsend’s warbler from Costa Rica, so high in the tallest spruce it was pretty much invisible. And, the sound of summer, the fluty call of a male Swainson’s thrush, a recent arrival from Panama.

Then there were the locals, the family of ravens screaming from a white spruce not far from the race start. Baby ravens grow to adult size almost right away; you can tell newborns by their pinkish inner mouths, which are visible because the chicks shriek all the time.

The squishing of sneakers was a reminder that cold is the most common state of this country (Fairbanks’ year-round average temperature is a hair below freezing). Spongy wet trail betrayed the presence of icy ground underneath that acted like a sheet of plastic, not allowing winter’s snowmelt to drain away. That hidden permafrost is a legacy of a colder time, hundreds and thousands of years ago when frigid air penetrated deep. Permafrost is not present in southern Alaska, nor on the south-facing, higher elevation places on the UAF campus.

At the end, as I sank into a folding chair for a delicious rest, I thought of the truism spoken by Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen. On an unsuccessful quest for the North Pole during which he had fed most of his sled dogs to one another, Nansen found himself on a floating raft of sea ice, grinding up against other chunks, with no apparent way out.

He of course made it home, because he wrote this memorable quote in his book, “Farthest North.” It seemed fitting for the tough moments of the Alaska Endurance Trail Run, and anything else that seems like it will go on forever.

“Everything comes to an end, and so did this.”

Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.

• On Monday, June 11, the Down Memory Lane interview series will host a discussion with Dan Swift, a former UAF professor of physics who taught 1963-1994. Veteran journalist Robert Hannon will conduct the interview at 7 p.m. in the Elvey Building auditorium.
• On Tuesday, June 12, the Healthy Living lecture series will feature naturopathic doctor Scott Luper on “Mechanics of Memory: How It Breaks Down and How to Fix It.” The lecture will be at 7 p.m. in the Murie Building auditorium.
• On Wednesday, June 13, the Discover Alaska lecture series will present Patrick Druckenmiller, the University of Alaska Museum of the North earth sciences curator, discussing “Dinosaurs of Darkness: The Latest on Alaska’s Dinosaur Research.” The lecture will be at 7 p.m. in the Murie Building auditorium.
• On Thursday, June 14, the Music in the Garden concert series will host O Tallulah, a family band featuring a mix of old-time, gospel, country and folk styles. Music begins at 7 p.m. in Georgeson Botanical Garden.

For more information, visit the Summer Sessions events website or call 907-474-7021.

By Meghan Murphy

Kiersten Johnson isn’t afraid of reaching new heights.

The newly minted University of Alaska Fairbanks alumna will elevate her learning of atmospheric science with a prestigious internship aboard a NASA research aircraft.

After considering hundreds of applicants, NASA selected Johnson to be one of 28 interns with the NASA Student Airborne Research Program based in southern California. Johnson recently earned her degree in chemistry.

The interns will study the Earth’s lands, oceans and atmosphere through scientific instruments aboard NASA’s DC-8 aircraft. They will also look at satellite and ground-based data as they pursue individual projects focused on all the data collected.

“I’m excited to learn about what goes into setting up an aircraft for sampling and the processes that follow for sample analysis and presentation,” she said. “My long-term plan is to stay in Alaska, so I hope I can learn how to apply some aspects of the program to help improve sampling, education or analysis for Alaska.”

Johnson, who is from Palmer, Alaska, said the internship won’t just push her to new heights — it will also push her to new locations.

“I’m really excited to go and meet students from across the United States and learn from all the of the people working with the program,” she said. “However, it makes me pretty nervous to pick up and go to California for a couple months, as I’ve never lived outside of Alaska before.”

The internship will run June 17-Aug. 10.

Johnson said she learned about the internship from her mentor, chemistry professor Jingqiu Mao of UAF’s College of Natural Science and Mathematics and Geophysical Institute. He studies how human activities influence the global atmosphere.

Johnson has worked in Mao’s lab as an undergraduate researcher for the past two semesters. She helped study the health effects of air pollution by examining the water soluble aerosol metals in the Fairbanks air.

As part of the research, she has learned how to take air samples and analyze data — but all from the ground.

Mao said the internship will give Johnson a new perspective on atmospheric research and on how she can develop as both a scientist and a leader.

“This experience helps students learn about a wide range of research topics relevant to climate change and help them to develop a vision for earth system research in the next several decades,” he said. “Internships like this will train and educate the next generation of leaders in climate research like Kiersten.”

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Jingqiu Mao, jmao2@alaska.edu, 907-474-7118

This collaborative exhibit, sponsored by the arts-humanities-science consortium, features 14 artists and writers who magnify the microbiome. The project was directed by Mary Beth Leigh, associate professor of microbiology.

Learn more about the collaboration.

Recent University of Alaska Fairbanks graduate Brandt Lomen has taken the top prize in the university’s 2018 Invent Alaska Competition for a device that can test solar cells on Earth, in space and on other planets by mimicking the light of the sun.

Lomen’s Pseudo-Sun Instrument was initially designed to test the solar cells on satellites, but when Lomen presented the instrument at a conference, researchers there had ideas for numerous applications, terrestrial and extraterrestrial.

The Pseudo-Sun Instrument uses a combination of colored LED lights to mimic the sun’s spectrum and can be adjusted to match the sun’s location in relation to the solar cell.

The $7,500 in prize money from the competition will fund a student to continue Lomen’s work and to conduct research on potential customers. Lomen has accepted a job at BAE Systems Inc. but will continue to be involved in the development of the Pseudo-Sun Instrument.

The Invent Alaska Competition, sponsored by the UAF Office of Intellectual Property and Commercialization, aims to encourage invention and commercialization of inventions by UAF and University of Alaska Southeast students and employees.

Other winners of this year’s competition include:

• UAS researcher Heidi Pearson for a video camera and sensor system to record dolphin behavior and life events in their natural habitat.
• UAF undergraduate student Aaron Rouse for a radio frequency check-in/check-out system for mining operations.
• UAF affiliate professor Lee Santoro for Arctic Automatic, a smart controller that can help prevent vehicles from freezing up in Arctic conditions.

For additional information, visit https://inventalaska.com.

ADDITIONAL CONTACT: Amanda Byrd, agbyrd@alaska.edu, 907-474-7544.

Students receiving a 3.9 grade point average or higher are placed on the chancellor’s list, while those receiving a grade point average of between 3.5 and 3.89 are named to the deans’ list.

UAF is a Land, Sea and Space Grant institution. Located 160 miles south of the Arctic Circle, UAF is the leading doctoral degree-granting institution in the state. Since it was founded in 1917, UAF has been internationally recognized for research relating to the Arctic and sub-Arctic, in areas such as biology, geophysics, engineering, natural resources and global climate change.

NOTE TO EDITORS: Students who have earned academic honors but have requested that their directory information remain confidential may not appear on the public honors list.

• Chancellor’s list
• Deans’ list

KaJeng Wong of Hong Kong wins first prize and the chamber music prize of the 2018 Alaska International Piano-e-Competition.

The Inside Out program offers a comprehensive preview for students who want to learn more about UAF. Students and parents will be given information about financial aid, the admission process, extracurricular activities, academic programs and professors.

Inside Out includes walking tours, academic presentations, question-and-answer sessions and a variety of other opportunities. Lunch is included. Check-in begins at 8 a.m. and activities conclude at 4 p.m.

To register and find more information, go to the Inside Out website or call 907-474-7500.

A graduate student from UAF has won a prestigious fellowship with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Richard Buzard, a recent graduate from the College of Natural Science and Mathematics, is working on his doctoral studies in geoscience with Chris Maio, an assistant professor of coastal geography.

The two-year fellowship provides on-the-job training opportunities in coastal resource management and policy for postgraduate students, and provides project assistance to Digital Coast partner organizations.

Buzard, a former Alaska Sea Grant research trainee, will be based in Anchorage and work under the supervision of Jacquelyn Overbeck, lead scientist and manager of the Coastal Hazards Program within the State of Alaska’s Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys.

“The state of Alaska and the National States Geographic Information Council are very lucky to have Richard Buzard join as our organizations’ Digital Coast Fellow. Rich brings both the technical acuity and the experience working with Alaska Native tribes that is needed to successfully map, monitor and move forward with coastal flood mapping in our state,” said Overbeck.

Buzard’s graduate work at UAF, funded by Alaska Sea Grant, focused on measuring past and current rates of shoreline erosion in 11 villages in the Bristol Bay region, using tools such as aerial and satellite imagery, time-lapse video, drones and ground penetrating radar. He also worked closely with tribal and city officials to install erosion-monitoring equipment and trained them to use it. He received his master’s degree this spring.

Buzard’s Digital Coast Fellowship work is designed to close vast information and data gaps about coastal Alaska’s vulnerability to flooding and shoreline erosion. His research will take place in 13 coastal communities in western Alaska and will include building a GIS-based online mapping tool for visualizing flood impacts.

More than 80 percent of Alaskans who live in coastal communities are vulnerable to extreme storms, flooding and erosion. Critical infrastructure like homes, schools, tribal offices, fuel storage tanks, clinics and roads are in danger of being destroyed in many coastal villages. Alaska lacks the baseline data to adequately forecast flood and erosion hazards and allow residents to plan for the future to minimize harm.

“I’m very much looking forward to working closely with the residents of these villages to help them bolster their resilience in the face of severe climate change impacts,” said Buzard.

The board approved adding the Cooperative Extension Services as a standalone unit and eliminating the School of Natural Resources and Extension. SNRE’s academic programs will move into the College of Natural Science and Mathematics. The changes take effect at the end of next fiscal year, on June 30, 2019.

On May 22, Chancellor Daniel M. White notified employees in the affected units about the specific reorganization request that was to go before the board. The reorganization has been in the process of being developed for several months with input from a committee of natural resource management and CNSM faculty, and planning will continue for the next year.

The board also approved two new degree programs: the Bachelor of Applied Management and the Bachelor of Sport and Recreation Business degrees. More news about the BOR meeting, including the recently approved budget, is on the UA website.

Read more.

— Teaching Tip by Christen Bouffard, an instructional designer, adjunct faculty and Google for Education-certified trainer with 14 years of design experience in academics and higher education

A team in the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks created the tool, which transforms predictions from global climate models into more detailed information about local conditions.

“We recognized that these global climate models by themselves cannot be used at face value,” said UAF’s John Walsh, the project’s lead researcher. “The raw output is not suitable for what many users or decision-makers want. That recognition was the motivator.”

So the team created a community charts tool to help people see and interpret the data. The tool displays temperature and precipitation projections through 2100 under three scenarios for more than 4,000 communities in Alaska and western Canada. The scenarios are based on three different levels of greenhouse gas emissions linked to the burning of fossil fuels.

The tool can be customized. For instance, it allows users to ask questions like which winter months may transition to above-freezing temperatures. Season lengths can affect transportation, subsistence hunting and fishing, and other activities.

The tool is hosted at the UAF Scenarios Network for Alaska and Arctic Planning group’s website.

“You can get an output at the SNAP website for your community based on the work of thousands of people in the climate modeling enterprise around the world,” Walsh explained. “We’ve distilled all of these efforts down to tools that will get you the information you really want for your location.”

The tool uses data from a process called statistical downscaling, which takes global climate models and transforms them into models with finer resolution.

With the help of the SNAP group, the climate research center’s team looked at 30 global models and identified five that worked best for Alaska and the Arctic. They compared what the models said should have happened from 1958-2004 to actual historical data from that period.

“Since climate in Alaska varies considerably from year to year and decade to decade, we want to use the longest record possible,” explained co-author Jeremy Littell, a climate center researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey in Anchorage. “Averages for 50 or 100 years are more reliable than 10 or 20 years.”

The SNAP team also developed a tool for modelers and climate experts to better identify useful models. Of the roughly 30 global climate models to select from, each has strengths and weaknesses when considering different regions and variables.

“The community charts tool is something very useful that came out of this, but so is the companion tool that was created to help others in the research and modeling community to better identify accurate models to help their future projections,” said SNAP operations lead Tom Kurkowski.

The researchers described their work in a recently published paper in the journal Environmental Modeling and Software.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: John Walsh, 907-474-2677, jewalsh@alaska.edu

ON THE WEB:
Community data: https://www.snap.uaf.edu/sites/all/modules/snap_community_charts/charts.php
Tool for modelers: https://uasnap.shinyapps.io/ar5eval/

If the answer is no, this will be the second year in a row with no COLA increase. A previous Grapevine question highlighted the fact that the UA pension plan contribution rate has been capped at its current limit since 1992; in addition, the newest PERS/TERS tiers offer less benefit than previous versions. Please address how the university plans to retain employees by keeping total compensation competitive with other employers.

Thank you.

“This course is incredibly useful in creating a new online course or modifying an existing course,” said Associate Professor Sarah Fleisher Trainor. “The assignments guide you through the conceptual framing and the nuts and bolts of online instruction. Course instructors are knowledgeable, helpful, thoughtful and patient.”

Faculty and adjuncts must apply by June 29 at iteachu.uaf.edu/apply-for-iteach-online. iTeach Online is open to all University of Alaska faculty.

Download flier.

• On Monday, June 4, the UAF Legacy Lecture will feature “An Evening With Neal Brown.” Brown, the former director of Poker Flat Research Range, has been a longtime advocate for science education and outreach. The lecture will be at 7 p.m. at the Murie Building auditorium.
• On Tuesday, June 5, the Healthy Living lecture series will host osteopathic doctor Todd Capistrant to discuss “Pain — Reasons Beyond Inflammation: How Osteopathic Medicine Can Address Function and Pain to Keep You Moving.” The lecture will be at 7 p.m. at the Murie Building auditorium.
• On Wednesday, June 6, the Discover Alaska lecture series will present Mary Erhlander, the director of UAF’s Arctic and Northern studies program, on “Walter Harper, Alaska Native Son.” The lecture will be at 7 p.m. at the Murie Building auditorium.
• On Thursday, June 7, the Music in the Garden concert series will feature Cold Steel Drums playing Caribbean-influenced music. Music begins at 7 p.m. at the Georgeson Botanical Garden.

For more information, visit www.uaf.edu/summer/events/ or call 907-474-7021.

Earth scientists consistently look for a reliable way to forecast earthquakes. New research from University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute professor Carl Tape may help in that endeavor, due to a unique set of circumstances.

“Our observations have recorded an unequivocally interesting sequence of events,” Tape said.

Tape and his colleagues found evidence for accelerating activity before a 2016 earthquake in a laterally moving fault zone in central Alaska. The activity included a phenomenon known as very low-frequency earthquakes, referring to the type of energy waves associated with it.

Typical earthquakes have two associated energy waves, called the P and S waves. Very low-frequency earthquakes do not have such signals. Instead, their waves occur on much lower frequencies.

“Most earthquakes start abruptly, but not always,” said Luciana Astiz, a program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Earth Sciences, which supported the research. “A fault zone in central Alaska monitored by new scientific instruments offers a look at a more complex process. This study reports the first observations of a slow process that transitions into an earthquake — something previously observed only in laboratory experiments. These new observations contribute toward understanding the physics of earthquakes.”

In 2015, Tape installed 13 seismic stations in the Minto Flats of central Alaska to capture the area’s fault activity. Nine days later, the instruments recorded a long-duration, very low-frequency process, normally only seen in deep subduction zones. This event showed a small amount of activity gathering, or nucleating, in a central area below the surface. It did not lead to an earthquake.

A second, similar event in 2016 led to a key observation. At Minto Flats, a magnitude 3.7 quake occurred at a depth of about 10.5 miles, not an unusual event in itself. However, the event was preceded by a 12-hour accelerating sequence of earthquakes and 22 seconds of distinct high- and low-frequency waves in a concentrated area.

Tape said that this kind of slow event transitioning into a rupture had previously only been seen in laboratory experiments.

“The rupture process started, then it found a patch of the fault that was ready to go, and that’s what people have not seen. It’s really exciting,” Tape said.

“The leap we make, and maybe the more controversial thing, is that this emergent long-period signal only seen on top of the fault is a low-frequency signal that can sometimes turn into an earthquake and sometimes not,” Tape said.  

Tape and his colleagues may have seen this kind of activity before. In 2012, there was a similar small event recorded in central Alaska. At that time, a magnitude 8.6 earthquake took place under the Indian Ocean and its energy was felt around the world. Because of the magnitude of this event, the smaller activity from central Alaska was overshadowed. Whatever signal the Minto Flats site gave off could not be confirmed. However, it was intriguing enough to help justify putting sensors in the area.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I expect we’d see something like that again,” Tape said. “I assumed that the conditions that happened in 2012 were somehow unique and that huge surface waves led to this nucleation. Even though I proposed putting instruments on the area in a proposal, it was the last item I put on. I thought, “Maybe we’ll see something crazy out there.'”

By 2016, Tape had high-quality stations on top of the Minto Flat faults, around 18 miles from the main events, and no triggering earthquake to complicate the data.

“We are staring right at this process, and what it showed was that exactly during the tremor-like signal there is this emergent long-duration signal that hints at what’s driving this nucleation phase,” he said.

Geologists have been looking for something like this for a long time. So why hasn’t anyone seen it?

“I’m left saying ‘I don’t know,’” Tape said. “I’m going to assume everyone has been looking for something before the P wave forever. It leads me to believe there is something special about this fault zone.”

Minto Flats has a deep sedimentary basin, strike-slip faulting, active tectonics and deep earthquakes; it is an unusual site.

“In some ways, I wish there wasn’t anything special. I wish it was a global phenomenon that we discovered, but it’s not,” Tape said. “It appears there is something special about the conditions in Minto Flats.”

The results of the research will appear in the latest issue of the journal Nature Geoscience. The paper is titled “Earthquake Nucleation and Fault Slip Complexity in the Lower Crust of Central Alaska.” 

The project was primarily funded by a National Science Foundation CAREER project that supported Tape and his student co-authors, Vipul Silwal and Kyle Smith.

In Alan Weisman’s book, “The World Without Us,” the author ponders “a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow.”

In his thought experiment, Weisman travels around the world to explore that question, revealing that cockroaches and bedbugs would not fare well without our sloppiness and warmth, but Theodore Roosevelt’s granite face will stare down from Mount Rushmore for the next 7.2 million years.

Weisman devotes a chapter to buildings, going into detail on their natural, gradual destruction. It all begins with water, Weisman writes, quoting a farmer who said a sure way to destroy a barn is to cut an 18-inch hole in its roof.

Posed with the question of the fate of Alaska structures without us, researchers with the Cold Climate Housing Research Center in Fairbanks agreed that the liquid stuff of life is the most powerful agent of demise.

The research center’s Ilya Benesch has witnessed the slow and interesting fade of a mining building in Poorman, Alaska, which benefited from a still-intact tin roof. Built in the early 1900s, the structure, about 70 miles south of Ruby, was still in decent shape about 75 years later.

“Inside, tools were still on the shelves, (as were) duplicate and triplicate spare parts and rebuild sets for a lot of the equipment they used,” he said. “The biggest issue was bears and porcupines that broke in and started making a mess of things.”

Most other structures, even those in the dry and cold interior of Alaska, where decomposition is on hold for half the year, don’t fare so well.

“The old town of Chatanika (about 25 miles north of Fairbanks) was vibrant and occupied up into the 1930s, and there is almost nothing left,” said Robbin Garber-Slaght, the center’s product testing lab engineer. “The camp that covered the whole hill is gone.”

She and others at the center noted that in an extreme climate like ours, water eats a building from the inside as well as the outside.

The problem would start as soon as power stations run out of coal or diesel or natural gas and there’s no one there to feed them. Dropping temperatures within buildings would then freeze pipes, water tanks and bottles of apple juice. The expansion of those frozen liquids liberates them from containers, and there the problems start, said research engineer Bruno Grunau.

“The spring thaw would ease these liquids right onto the floor of your home, hastening rot of the structure, and beginning the gently accelerating path toward decomposition,” he said.

The longevity of Alaska buildings depends largely upon the materials builders used, said Aaron Cooke, an architectural designer who grew up in Alaska and works with the Technical University of Denmark.

“Organic stuff goes first,” he said. “Metals rust second, and ceramics last the longest. Except for maybe stainless steel.

“In Shaktoolik, which is prone to violent storms, the old village school (circa 1940) had its wooden body obliterated,” he said. “The concrete foundation remains.”

Some people think concrete is less enduring in the North, but it holds up for a long time when a building is not heated, Cooke said.

“As soon as they go cold, they can’t damage the ground anymore (by warming the permafrost), which means that they can’t damage themselves (by wrecking their foundations). Ironically, there are some buildings in the high Arctic that would last far longer without us in them.”

Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute. A version of this column appeared in 2011.

No other bus stop locations have changed. All new locations will have signs in place by the end of the day on Friday, June 1. The shuttle tracker will be changed for the new construction routes.

For more information call 474-7000.

Mark your calendar for July 19-21 for Nanook Rendezvous 2018, the annual UAF alumni reunion. Alumni from all years are encouraged to attend.

The celebration will begin at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, July 19, with a picnic in the garden, followed by Nanook night at the Goldpanners, a Riverboat Discovery ride and a final gathering at Ursa Major.

Make sure to register in advance. View the full schedule and RSVP here.

Beginning at 9 a.m., 36 flower beds will be available to plant across campus. Sign-up tables will be in front of Constitution Hall and the Murie Building with maps and planting tools.

For more information, call 474-7000.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy has announced an award for a project to receive approximately $7 million in federal funding for cost-shared research and development in unconventional oil and natural gas recovery.

The project, selected under the Office of Fossil Energy’s Advanced Technology Solutions for Unconventional Oil and Gas Development funding opportunity, will address critical gaps in our understanding of reservoir behavior and optimal well-completion strategies, next-generation subsurface diagnostic technologies, and advanced offshore technologies.

As part of the funding opportunity announcement, DOE solicited research field projects in UOG plays in a variety of environments and geological formations to better understand the subsurface and improve oil and gas recovery efficiency. Research focuses on addressing challenges of flow conformance and sweep efficiency, and the geophysical and geochemical mechanisms governing enhanced gas and oil recovery, in a variety of environments.

The newly selected project will help DOE master oil and gas development in these types of unconventional formations––and more specifically in the Artic region. The project will also bolster DOE’s efforts to strengthen America’s energy dominance; protect air and water quality; position the nation as a global leader in UOG resource development technologies; and ensure the maximum value of the nation’s resource endowment is realized.

The project represents a critical component of DOE’s portfolio to advance the economic viability and environmentally sound development of domestic UOG resources and support ongoing programmatic efforts in both onshore and offshore UOG research. These efforts include:

1. Improving understanding of the processes involved in resource development;
2. Advancing technologies and engineering practices to ensure these resources are developed efficiently with minimal environmental impact and risk; and
3. Increasing the supply of U.S. oil and natural gas resources to enhance national energy dominance and security.

The National Energy Technology Laboratory will manage the project. A description of the awarded project follows:

Alaska North Slope Field Laboratory – Enhanced Oil Recovery
The University of Alaska Fairbanks will investigate the first-ever polymer flood for heavy oil resources on the Alaska North Slope in the Milne Point Field. The estimates of total heavy oil in place within the ANS reservoirs amounts to about 20–25 billion barrels, with around two-thirds of the heavy oil lying under the adjacent Kuparic River Unit. Traditional water floods have yielded low oil recoveries while thermal, miscible fluids and gas injection methods are not applicable to this resource. Laboratory and simulation studies indicate that polymer flooding has great potential to enhance oil recovery from the Schrader Bluff heavy oil reservoirs. This field test will advance knowledge of heavy oil’s production viability using polymer floods at ANS and across the United States. Success at this location will strengthen the viability of the Trans Alaska Pipeline System in the upcoming decade and improve royalty and other fees to the U.S. taxpayer.
DOE funding: $6,967,196; Non-DOE funding: $2,584,285; Total value: $9,551,481

To learn more about the programs within the Office of Fossil Energy, visit the Office of Fossil Energy website or sign up for FE news announcements. More information about the National Energy Technology Laboratory is available on the NETL website.

The event will begin with a safety briefing at 9 a.m. at the Lions Club Park off Danby Road. Volunteers will work on foot and by canoe; rubber boots or chest waders are recommended. All supplies will be provided, as well as transportation to and from various points. All ages are welcome, but please note that children under 13 must be accompanied by an adult.

For more information, contact Andrew Ackerman at 459-6836 or email aackerman@fairbanks.us.

View the flyer here: 2018-Stream-Cleanup-Day-Flyer.

Life returned to the asteroid-blasted Chicxulub crater much sooner than at some other sites far from the impact point 66 million years ago, according to a University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist and fellow researchers.

UAF Geophysical Institute professor Michael Whalen studied a core drilled about 4,500 feet below the crater, offshore of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

Whalen and colleagues, led by Christopher Lowery at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, reported on their study in an article published May 30 in the journal Nature.

Their evidence shows that life returned to the Chicxulub crater only two to three years after the asteroid’s impact. Whalen found ovals made by burrowing worms in the uppermost impact-related sediments.

By 30,000 years after impact, a thriving ecosystem was present in the crater, with microscopic plants supporting a diverse community of organisms in the surface waters and on the seafloor.

In contrast, other areas around the world, including the North Atlantic and other parts of the Gulf of Mexico, took up to 300,000 years to recover in a similar manner. The scientists said local factors, such as water circulation, organism interactions and the availability of ecological niches, would have influenced a particular ecosystem’s recovery rate.

An asteroid impact created the crater about 66 million years ago. The asteroid was about 9 miles in diameter, and it made a crater about 125 miles across. The impact killed 75 percent of life on Earth, including most of the dinosaurs, and marked the beginning of a new era in geological history.

“The impact crater is very well preserved because it sat there with carbonate sediments being deposited on top of it ever since the impact occurred,” Whalen said. “And so it’s one of the best-preserved impact craters on Earth. It was one of the reasons we picked it to do these studies, to get a better understanding of the return of life after the impact event.”

Whalen studied a core collected by the International Ocean Discovery Program and International Continental Drilling Program in 2016. Whalen, who specializes in limestone sedimentary rocks and their fossils, led the visual core description team for the sedimentary part of the core. He was interested mostly in the upper 1,050 feet, representing the marine sediments deposited after the impact.

“We found evidence of bioturbation within the uppermost part of that unit, indicating very, very quick return of life to the crater,” said Whalen.

The evidence showed a much quicker recovery of life than at other sites around the world. That undermines a theory that recovery at sites closest to a crater would be the slowest because of environmental contaminants such as toxic metals released by the impact. Instead, the evidence suggests that recovery around the world was influenced primarily by local factors, which could have implications for environments affected by climate change today.

“The impact at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary is one of the most amazing events in Earth’s history,” Whalen said. “It basically changed the entire ecosystem to the point where we lost a lot of various organisms both on the oceans and on the land.”

The IODP, ICDP, National Science Foundation and NASA funded the research.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Michael Whalen, 907-474-5302, mtwhalen@alaska.edu; Christopher Lowery, 804-837-3391, cmlowery@utexas.edu

ON THE WEB: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0163-6

During a soft closure, departments have the option to close their offices or reduce their business hours. Employees may not be required to take leave and may work even if their office is closed. Employees who participate in the soft closure must have the permission of their supervisor, and must take annual leave, leave without pay, faculty time off or a furlough day. FY19 personal holiday hours will not be available by July 6.

If you have questions about your leave or your department’s soft closure plan, consult your payroll and personnel assistant, or call Human Resources at 474-7700.