Submarine optical fibers are nowadays the core backbone of international communications, carrying over 99% of the intercontinental data traffic. These critical infrastructures for communications have also recently demonstrated to have strong potential for geophysical monitoring in the bottom of the oceans. In this paper, we show that submarine optical fiber cables can be used to gain knowledge on the planet and its dynamics, including more accurate estimations of currents and other water mixing phenomena that have strong impact in climate change estimations. Among other things, we show that internal waves, a large-scale phenomenon generated by the interaction of barotropic tides with bathymetric changes in the sea-bottom, can be very accurately observed by deploying chirped-pulse Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) technology over these cables.
Monitoring of seismic activity around the word is a topic of high interest for the analysis and understanding of deep Earth dynamics. However, the deployment of a homogeneous network of seismic stations both onshore and offshore poses a strong economic challenge that makes this solution practically inviable. Using the pre-existing fiber optical network for seismic monitoring arises as an excellent solution with important advantages in terms of ubiquity and cost. In this communication, we present the detection of an M8.2 earthquake occurred in Fiji Island using distributed acoustic sensing based on chirped-pulse φOTDR. Two sensors were placed simultaneously at two different locations at >9,000 km from the earthquake epicenter: a metropolitan area and a submarine environment. The recorded data is postprocessed using a 2D linear filter to cancel out environmental noise. The resulting signals are compared with the signals acquired by nearby seismometers. The attained good matching between the recorded data and the seismometer data shows the strong potential of the use of the already-deployed communication fiber network for teleseism monitoring.
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