Or at least I hope that’s what lead to this:
A 10,000-kilometre-long fibre-optic cable owned by Google that is at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean can be used to detect deep-sea seismic activity and ocean waves.
Zhongwen Zhan at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, and his colleagues, including researchers at Google, used traffic data from one of the tech giant’s optical fibres to measure changes in pressure and strain in the cable. Using this data, they could detect earthquakes and ocean waves called swells generated by storms.
Over a nine-month period, the team recorded around 30 ocean storm swell events and around 20 earthquakes over magnitude 5 – strong enough to damage buildings – including the magnitude 7.4 earthquake event near Oaxaca, Mexico, in June 2020. The team had wanted to measure a tsunami, but none occurred during the monitoring. [“Google uses underwater fibre-optic cable to detect earthquakes,” Priti Parikh, NewScientist (6 March 2021)]
This is one of those unplanned science research efforts that I generally find delightful. I can imagine the phone call: Hey! We just realized something really cool …
