Fairbanks learned long ago that arctic knowledge is power

COMMUNITY PERSPECTIVE

By Kristopher D. Brown

The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner’s Aug. 13 article on NOAA’s decision to stop coordinating the annual Arctic Report Card quoted someone immediately familiar to me: my younger sister, Melody Brown Burkins.

Melody grew up with me in Fairbanks and now directs Dartmouth College’s Institute of Arctic Studies. She observed that ending NOAA’s support won’t stop the Arctic from changing, scientists from studying it or the people who live there from trying to build thriving lives.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski put the larger point succinctly: “We need to invest more in the region, not less.”

Fairbanks learned that lesson long ago.

Our father, Neal Brown, spent more than four decades at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute and 18 years directing Poker Flat Research Range. His career demonstrated something increasingly important today: Scientific knowledge isn’t separate from America’s strategic presence in the Arctic. It is part of it.

My father began his career at NASA in 1961, when scientists were trying to understand the ionized gases surrounding spacecraft during atmospheric re-entry.

That work led him to plasma physics and eventually to the aurora borealis, a natural laboratory for studying the upper atmosphere and near-Earth space.

Poker Flat itself emerged partly from a remarkable collision of science and Cold War geopolitics.

In January 1968, a U.S. Air Force B-52 carrying four thermonuclear weapons crashed near Thule Air Base in Greenland, contaminating the ice and creating a diplomatic crisis with Denmark. Scientists at UAF had already envisioned an Alaska rocket range. With further American high-altitude research in Greenland complicated by the accident, the need for a high-latitude location on American soil suddenly became urgent.

They found it north of Fairbanks, beneath the auroral zone. Within a year, rockets were flying from Poker Flat.

The early range hardly looked like an assertion of American power. My father affectionately described some of its builders as “experienced hooligans with Alaska homesteader personalities.” They worked with limited budgets, repurposed equipment and a remarkable willingness to improvise in an unforgiving environment.

Yet what they built endured. Poker Flat became the world’s only university-owned scientific sounding rocket range. Research conducted there helped scientists understand atmospheric and space phenomena that can affect communications, navigation, satellites and surveillance systems. Generations of scientists were trained there.

That history offers a lesson for Washington today.

America’s Arctic presence isn’t measured only in military bases, icebreakers, ports and natural resources. It is also measured in knowledge: satellites, weather stations, ocean buoys, radar, groundbased instruments, mapping, reliable communications, university research and decades of accumulated observations. It includes the knowledge of Alaska Native communities whose experience cannot be recreated by a satellite or visiting research team.

The Arctic Report Card is part of that infrastructure.

As the News-Miner reported, Alaska scientists have played an extraordinary role in producing it. About twothirds of the chapters in last year’s report included lead or contributing authors from Alaska, many from UAF.

NOAA says it will continue collecting and releasing the underlying data. That’s important.

But data aren’t knowledge. Before observations can guide decisions, experts must organize them, compare them with historical records, identify connections, challenge conclusions through peer review and communicate what they have learned. Preserving laboratory results while eliminating the assessment that interprets them is a little like preserving a patient’s test results while dispensing with the physician.

And this isn’t simply about climate policy.

Better Arctic knowledge supports aviation, navigation, fisheries, resource development, search and rescue, infrastructure planning and national defense. Whatever one’s politics concerning climate change, reducing America’s ability to understand a region we increasingly describe as strategically vital makes little sense.

Russia understands the importance of Arctic knowledge. China, despite having no Arctic coastline, calls itself a “near-Arctic state” and has invested in Arctic research, expeditions and commercial relationships.

After our father died in 2021, my siblings and I discovered nearly 1,100 pages of stories and recollections on his computer. Working with longtime Alaska science editor Sue Mitchell, we shaped them into Northern Lights and Rocket Flights: My Years at Poker Flat Research Range, published this month by Springer.

Reading those pages taught me something I hadn’t fully appreciated while growing up in Fairbanks.

The scientists, engineers and technicians around us weren’t simply studying interesting things in the sky. Collectively, and often without thinking of it this way, they were building America’s capacity to understand the North.

Scientific capability can take generations to build and surprisingly little time to weaken.

My father’s generation understood that knowledge of a place is itself a form of presence. At a moment when America’s strategic attention is again turning north, we shouldn’t have to relearn that lesson.

The nations that observe, measure, navigate and understand the Arctic will be best positioned to shape what happens there.

Fairbanks has been showing us how for generations.

Kristopher D. Brown was born and raised in Fairbanks. His father, Neal Brown, spent more than four decades at UAF’s Geophysical Institute and directed Poker Flat Research Range for 18 years. Brown and his family helped bring Neal Brown’s memoir, Northern Lights and Rocket Flights, to publication by Springer in August 2026. Brown is a law partner at Goodwin Procter LLP in New York City. The views expressed are his own.