Distributed sensing of earthquakes and ocean-solid Earth interactions on seafloor telecom cables

Creators: Sladen, A.; Rivet, D.; Ampuero, J. P.; De Barros, L.; Hello, Y.; Calbris, G.; Lamare, P.

Abstract

Two thirds of the surface of our planet are covered by water and are still poorly instrumented, which has prevented the earth science community from addressing numerous key scientific questions. The potential to leverage the existing fiber optic seafloor telecom cables that criss-cross the oceans, by turning them into dense arrays of seismo-acoustic sensors, remains to be evaluated. Here, we report Distributed Acoustic Sensing measurements on a 41.5 km-long telecom cable that is deployed offshore Toulon, France. Our observations demonstrate the capability to monitor with unprecedented details the ocean-solid earth interactions from the coast to the abyssal plain, in addition to regional seismicity (e.g., a magnitude 1.9 micro-earthquake located 100 km away) with signal characteristics comparable to those of a coastal seismic station.

Additional Information

CC-By Attribution 4.0 International. Submitted: June 05, 2019; Last edited: July 19, 2020. We thank the team from the Centre de Physique des Particules de Marseille who greatly facilitated the access the infrastructure. The MEUST infrastructure is financed with the support of the CNRS/IN2P3, the Region Sud, France (CPER the State (DRRT) and the Europe (FEDER). This work was supported by the SEAFOOD project, funded in part by grant ANR-17-CE04-0007 of the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche and in part by Université Côte d'Azur IDEX program UCA JEDI ANR-15-IDEX-0001.

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