05/24/2022

Undersea Cables Are Carrying Scientific Secrets

The world’s cables could form a network for detecting earthquakes, tsunamis

These very words may have flown through an undersea cable before reaching your eyeballs. Hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optics crisscross the world’s oceans, shuttling emails, Netflix shows and news articles as packets of light. And, scientifically speaking, boy does that light have a story to tell—not so much about what happens on land, but what happens in the deep.

Writing last week in the journal Science, researchers described how they used a 3,600-mile cable stretching between Halifax, Canada, and Southport, in the United Kingdom, to detect storms, tides and earthquakes. Because the cable lies on the seafloor, such perturbations create tiny but measurable disturbances in the fiber optics, changing how the light speeds across the Atlantic Ocean. These changes give a reading of the location of the quake or other disturbance. 

This technique—a form of interferometric sensing—is similar to another increasingly popular system among researchers: distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS. Here scientists fire a laser through underground (but unused) telecom fiber-optic cables and analyze what bounces back. If a car or person passes overhead and disturbs the cable, that vibration scatters some light back to its source. Measuring how long it takes the scattered light to travel gives an idea of the size of the object passing overhead. Researchers have also laid cable around Mount Etna, an active volcano in Italy, and used DAS to monitor its rumbles.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.