[Rockhounds] How Deep-Sea Fiber Optic Cables Could ‘Transform’ Our Detection of Earthquakes

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Many miles off the western coast of the Americas, an undersea
cable connects Los Angeles, California to Valparaiso, Chile. Stretched
end-to-end, it’s equal to four-fifths of the Earth’s diameter. The cable is
fiber optic; it’s a lifeline for data transmitted between the two
continents. But according to new research, the cable could easily serve a
dual function: mitigating the disastrous impacts of earthquakes and
tsunamis.

The results come from an interdisciplinary collaboration between
geophysicists and network engineers who looked at disturbances in the
polarization of light being transmitted through the cables. A patent has
been filed in connection with the team’s paper on the subject, published
<https://eurekalert.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=394dac0d2e831bfd2ca7fc3b5&id=5bec832ae0&e=387b431e91>
on
Wednesday in the journal Science.

“There are scientific and societal implications here,” said Zhongwen Zhan,
the lead author of the new paper and a geophysicist at the California
Institute of Technology, in a video call. “Most of our geophysical sensors
for detecting earthquakes and studying what the interior of the Earth looks
like are on land, but a lot of the most important geological processes are
happening in the ocean. We’re leveraging pre-existing cables in the ocean
for a relatively scalable way of detecting earthquakes. We think in the
future we can use these for earthquake and tsunami early warnings.”

https://gizmodo.com/how-deep-sea-fiber-optic-cables-could-transform-our-d-1846357043