
What’s shaking? Earthquake detection with submarine cables - guiambros
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/using-subsea-cables-to-detect-earthquakes
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milesvp
I was recently talking with someone who manages seismic data, and using fiber
optics to collect seismic data is really taking off. The amount of data you
get is orders of magnitude more than a traditional station. They had a
problem, as custodians of seismic data, of someone trying to give them a new
data set that represented 10% of all their historic data.

It’s kind of crazy how easy it is to drown in data.

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jimmySixDOF
I was involved with a job using a Fiber based perimeter fence intrusion
detection system back when this was a new thing and the sensitivity was its
main problem due to false positives. You needed to rezone and adjust
thresholds in zones based on wind direction etc. Still it is a great tech &
nice to see it applied at this scale for pure science. BTW my understanding is
the idea was first commercialized by oil and gas to discover real-time
conditions down a drilling well head.

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cosmie
This is a really neat trick, and incredibly beneficial if it gets matured to
the point of a production-capable alerting system!

Question for anyone familiar with this type of work: would nearby submarine
traffic be detectable using this technique?

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iandanforth
"To create a robust earthquake monitoring system, researchers need advanced
mathematics and data analytics, where advanced computing systems like Google
Cloud can be instrumental."

Great article with the most tenuous tie-in ever. The authors were probably
thinking, "Look at all this great science, and holy cow this is a global
sensing device! ... oh wait we work for a corporation we better plug one of
its services somehow."

