The California Institute of Technology is using underwater cables to detect earthquakes and tsunamis before the advent of time

Caltech seismologists – who work with optics experts at Google – have developed a way to use underwater communication cables to detect earthquakes. This technology could improve earthquake and tsunami warning systems around the world.

An extensive network of optical fiber cables of more than a million kilometers lies at the bottom of the Earth’s oceans. In the 1980s, telecommunications companies and governments began laying these cables, each of which could extend thousands of kilometers. Today, the global network is the backbone of international communication.

Scientists have long sought to find a way to use these submerged cables to monitor earthquakes. After all, more than 70 percent of the globe is covered by water, and it is extremely difficult and costly to install, monitor, and operate underwater seismometers to track the movements of the earth under the seas.

What would be ideal, the researchers say, would be to monitor seismic activity by taking advantage of the infrastructure already in place along the ocean floor.

Zhongwen Zhan, Ph.D., assistant professor of geophysics at Caltech, and his colleagues have now come up with a way to analyze light that travels through “luminous” fibers – in other words, existing and working submarine cables – to detect earthquakes and ocean waves without the need for any additional equipment. They describe the new method in the February 26th issue of the journal Science.

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“This new technology could really convert the majority of submarine cables into geophysical sensors thousands of kilometers long to detect earthquakes and possibly tsunamis in the future,” says Zan. We believe this is the first solution for monitoring ocean floor seismic activity that can be implemented practically worldwide. “The existing network of seismometers and tsunami monitoring buoys can complement to make the detection of marine earthquakes and tsunamis much faster in many cases.”

Cable networks work by using lasers that send pulses of information through glass fibers grouped inside the cables to deliver data at rates faster than 200,000 kilometers per second to receivers at the other end, as the devices check the polarization status of each signal to witness how it has changed along a path. Cable to ensure signals are not mixed.

Related: New Japan Express designed with natural disasters and earthquakes in mind

The researchers focused their work on Curie, a submarine fiber optic cable that stretches more than 10,000 kilometers along the eastern edge of the Pacific Ocean from Los Angeles to Valparaiso, Chile.

On Earth, all kinds of disturbances, such as changes in temperature and even lightning strikes, can alter the polarization of the light that travels through optical fiber cables. Zhan and colleagues found that because the temperature in the depths of the ocean remains roughly constant and because there is little perturbation there, the change in polarization from one end of the Corey cable to the other remains quite constant over time.

However, during earthquakes and when storms produce large ocean waves, the polarization changes suddenly and dramatically, allowing researchers to easily identify such events in the data.

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Currently, seismic waves from earthquakes occurring miles offshore take minutes to reach ground seismometers – and even longer to check for any tsunami waves. Using the new technology, the entire length of the submarine cable acts as a single sensor for locations that are difficult to monitor. The polarization can be measured 20 times per second. This means that in the event of an earthquake near a certain area, a warning can be sent to potentially affected areas within seconds.

During the nine months of testing reported in the new study, researchers detected about 20 medium to large earthquakes along the Curie Cable, including the 7.7 magnitude earthquake that struck off Jamaica on January 28, 2020.

Although no tsunamis were detected during the study, the researchers were able to detect changes in polarization caused by the swelling of the oceans that arose in the Southern Ocean. They believe that changes in polarization were caused by pressure changes along the sea floor when strong waves passed through the cable. “This means that we can detect ocean waves, so it is plausible that one day we will be able to detect tsunamis,” says Zhan.

Check out: We might be able to stop a tsunami in their tracks by firing sound waves

Zhan and colleagues at the California Institute of Technology are now developing a machine learning algorithm that will be able to determine whether the detected changes in polarization are caused by earthquakes or ocean waves rather than some other system change, such as moving a ship or a crab for a cable. They expect the entire detection and notification process to be automated, as well as the network of seismometers and buoys in the DART (Deep Ocean Assessment and Tsunami Reporting) system administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Source: Caltech News by Kimm Fesenmaier

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