Image credit – Stamen Design and the Victoria and Albert Museum
Most of our internet is delivered through fiber optic cables that have been installed underground beneath cities. However it seems that apart from just being able to deliver internet to homes and businesses, researchers at Stanford have managed to come up with another use for these fiber optic cables, and that is to help detect earthquakes.
There are several ways in which one can detect an earthquake, but with this recent discovery, which was led by Biondo Biondi, a professor of geophysics at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental sciences, it has shown that we can just leverage existing systems and infrastructure. According to Biondi, “We can continuously listen to – and hear well – the Earth using preexisting optical fibers that have been deployed for telecom purposes.”
He adds that with this system, it is cheaper compared to existing methods of monitoring. “Every meter of optical fiber in our network acts like a sensor and costs less than a dollar to install. You will never be able to create a network using conventional seismometers with that kind of coverage, density and price.”
As it stands earthquakes are monitored using seismometers which are more sensitive compared to using fiber optics, but the disadvantage to this is that coverage is sparse, and can be expensive to install and maintain, especially in urban areas.
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