Today, seas and oceans remain mostly unmonitored with only a handful of permanent ocean-floor sensors existing globally.
This is due to the difficulty in installing and maintaining them, which can be prohibitively expensive. But it leaves a huge gap in geophysical data, limiting understanding of the Earth’s structure and its dynamic behaviour – datasets that can be used to predict earthquakes and monitor the impact of climate change among other phenomena.
A new method has been developed that can be used to convert these cables into an array of sensors. It has already been tested on a 5,860 km-long intercontinental submarine optical-fibre link between the UK and Canada. The cable, provided by EXA Infrastructure, is the largest dedicated digital infrastructure platform connecting Europe and North America.
The team showed the detection of earthquakes and ocean signals, such as waves and currents, on individual spans between repeaters spread across the entire...