A new study repurposes telecommunications cables to harness sound from light. The method can accurately measure ground motion from distant earthquakes.
In a new publication, Lindsey et al. used a novel seismic recording approach to study seismic waves from earthquakes for the first time. The technique, called distributed acoustic sensing, repurposes underground fiber-optic cables (normally used for telecommunications, such as internet, television, and telephone service) up to tens of kilometers long.
The researchers tested this technique at three locations: Fairbanks, Alaska; a region of northern California called the Geysers, home to one of the world’s largest geothermal fields; and the Stanford University campus.
At the Geysers, they were able to use an L-shaped array of cables to track the arrival of several phases of an earthquake that occurred in 2016.
Fiber-Optic Network Observations of Earthquake Wavefields, by Nathaniel J. Lindsey (Earth and Planetary Science Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA), et al. Geophysical Research Letters, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL075722, 2017
Fiber-Optic Network Observations of Earthquake Wavefields, by Nathaniel J. Lindsey (Earth and Planetary Science Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA), et al. Geophysical Research Letters, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL075722, 2017
(Thanks to GRC Member Marcelo Lippmann, Staff Scientist (retired) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the submission.)