Researchers Found a Better Way to Detect Earthquakes With Subsea Cables
Researchers in the UK have detailed another use for the subsea cables that allow the internet to function: detecting earthquakes and collecting data about the ocean's currents.
"Optical fiber–based sensing technology can drastically improve Earth observations by enabling the use of existing submarine communication cables as seafloor sensors," the researchers say(Opens in a new window) in the abstract of their Science article detailing their experiments with these systems.
The researchers note that using subsea cables to collect this data isn't novel, but the problem was that previous methods could only measure activity that affected the entire length of the cable. Their approach uses the spans of cable between repeaters to gather more data.
The researchers demonstrated the viability of their system using a subsea cable that connects the UK to Canada. The cable itself is said to be roughly 3,641 miles (5,860km) long, but it has individual spans that measure in at about 28-56 miles (45-90km) long between repeaters.
The BBC reports(Opens in a new window) that more than 430 optical-fiber subsea cables have been deployed around the world; they have a combined length of more than 800,000 miles. That means there are plenty of opportunities to apply this research to monitoring seismic activity and the ocean's currents.
"By applying this technique to the existing undersea communication cables," the researchers say, "the largely unmonitored ocean floor could be instrumented with thousands of permanent real-time environmental sensors without changes to the underwater infrastructure."
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