About a year after Russian-born Natalia Ruppert arrived in Fairbanks, she was playing volleyball when the gymnasium around her began to shake. Everyone else knew what was going on—Alaska is the most seismologically active state in the country, after all—but it was new to the young PhD candidate. She’d left the dismantling Soviet Union to study earth science, so “it was actually kind of exciting,” she remembers. “My first earthquake.”
Ruppert spent 30 years studying the phenomenon in the far north, flying in helicopters to remote seismology stations. At conferences she found herself among the few women scientists in attendance, an imbalance she’s seen change drastically over the years. She finally left Alaska in 2024 for the opportunity to lead the US Geological Survey’s ShakeAlert in Seattle, overseeing a project that stretches from California to the Canadian border. With a network of thousands of sensors, it aims to catch an earthquake in its first seconds, activating thousands of automated systems like gas valves to shut off before tremors wreak havoc. A quarter century after the 2001 Nisqually quake, Seattle is still trying to prepare for the next movement from the Cascadia Subduction Zone, an event that geologic history tells us could be catastrophic. From her office at the University of Washington, with a crew of scientists, analysts, and technical partners under her purview, Ruppert thinks the Pacific Northwest can learn to respond before we even feel the earth move.
Earthquakes—they are all so different, and there is always kind of new things to learn about plates and tectonics and human aspects as well. It’s never the same…