When the network becomes the sensor: How European research is turning submarine fibre-optic cables into seismic sentinels

Roughly 1.5 million kilometres of fibre-optic cable cross the world’s ocean floors. Built to carry data, this vast infrastructure is now being explored as something else entirely: a distributed instrument for observing the planet. Across Europe, a growing community of network operators, universities and research institutes is investigating how existing submarine cables, without compromising their primary role as data conduits, can double as sensors capable of detecting earthquakes, tsunamis and other seismic phenomena in real time.

Sparkle is one of the operators contributing infrastructure and historical data to this effort. But the story is really about a research collaboration that stretches across academia, industry and national geophysical agencies, and about what it can offer the wider research and education networking community.

Read the full article on Connect Magazine from Géant