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Opinion: How fiber-optic seismometers are revolutionizing the way seismographs are used
Mellors and Keelp are seismologists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Mellores lives in University City, Caleb in Rancho Peñasquitos. Rodríguez Tribaldos is a research scientist in the Geophysics Division of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory’s Earth and Environmental Sciences District. She lives in Berkeley.
The June 6 Imperial Valley earthquake that was widely felt in San Diego County not only shook people and buildings. The seismic waves generated by this event were recorded from 20 miles of buried fiber-optic cable running between El Centro and Calipatria, south of the Salton Sea.
In November 2020, these fibres, which normally carry Internet traffic, were redirected to serve as a massive array of seismographs. The result? A high-resolution image of earthquake waves is unparalleled, and can help improve earthquake safety in this earthquake-prone region.
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In recent years, fiber-optic seismographs have become a revolutionary development in seismology. Usually, earthquake waves are measured with seismographs, which are highly sensitive and expensive devices that must be installed with care.
These challenges limit the number of sites where seismographs can be deployed. In California, seismometers are often separated by 20 miles or more in even the most dangerous areas.
Fiber-optic sensors may help fill these data gaps. Using a new technology called distributed acoustic sensing, the same fibers are used to measure seismic waves traveling in the Earth, making thousands of measurements simply by sending laser pulses from one end of the cable and carefully analyzing the light reflected from tiny defects in optical, full-length fibers, from Calipatria to El Centro.
Variations in reflected light over time accurately record how the earthquake caused the cable to oscillate at each point. The best part? These unused fibers known as “dark fibers” were already there and it only took a day or so to install the sensor at one end. To obtain the results produced by a fiber seismometer using conventional seismographs, it would have taken tens of thousands of individually placed units, which would have required weeks or months of effort.
Sensors that detected the June 6 earthquake, as well as many smaller earthquakes before and after the major earthquake, have been an ongoing test of these new sensor technologies. Coincidentally, work was underway when the 5.3-magnitude earthquake struck just a few miles from where the sensors were buried. Seismologists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and Rice University in Houston are working on the project, which was funded by the US Department of Energy.
This earthquake recording demonstrates how this new technology can help reduce earthquake risks in California. The same technology can be used anywhere fiber-optic cables are already buried. In the United States, tens of thousands of miles of dark fiber are available, and many earthquake-prone cities in California sit on dense fiber-optic cable networks waiting to be used. Work is currently underway to explore the use of the existing network of fiber optic cables in California as part of earthquake early warning efforts.
Read more about the California earthquakes:
The abundant data and information collected by the fiber-optic cable may also help scientists understand the baffling and unclear process that controls when and how earthquakes occur. A key scientific question is understanding how the region’s frequent small earthquakes relate to larger events such as the 5.3-magnitude earthquake on June 6. Sometimes, a wave of small earthquakes occurs in the same location over a period of time. days or weeks. This is called a swarm. Occasionally, a larger earthquake will strike in the middle of a continuous swarm event, with smaller earthquakes before (frontal tremors) and after (aftershocks) the main earthquake. Locust swarms are common in some places, such as Imperial Valley, but no one knows exactly why. Data from the fiber-optic cable may improve understanding of how small earthquakes relate to large earthquakes, which can help predict earthquakes.
But new technologies are not without challenges, and this is no exception. One of the biggest problems is dealing with the huge amount of data gained. The optical fiber sensor produces a fire hose from the data; The fiber-optic data from this experiment alone is equivalent to the amount of data recorded by standard seismometer recordings across Southern California combined. An added difficulty is that the fibers are highly sensitive to passing trains, nearby traffic, and distant quarry blasts, as well as earthquakes. New automated techniques such as machine learning may be necessary to handle such large amounts of data and automatically identify earthquakes among other signals.
But for now, the team is delighted with the windfall, and other researchers around the world are eager to see the data.
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