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Fiber Optic Cables Find Use as Seismic Sensors

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Dark fiber, an excess of optical fiber cables underground, could soon function as sensor arrays, particularly in applications such as seismic monitoring and other subsurface activity.

ROBIN RILEY, WEB EDITOR, [email protected]

The decade that gave us the Sony PlayStation also gave us dark fiber — an excess of optical fiber cables installed underground, mostly in the 1990s, before advances in data transmission reduced the need for all of those cables. Now, researchers on the earthquake-prone West Coast of the U.S. are putting dark fiber optic cables to use as sensor arrays for seismic monitoring. Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Stanford University have demonstrated that dark fiber networks can be used for sensing earthquakes, the presence of groundwater, changes in...Read full article

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    Published: January 2018
    Glossary
    optical fiber
    Optical fiber is a thin, flexible, transparent strand or filament made of glass or plastic used for transmitting light signals over long distances with minimal loss of signal quality. It serves as a medium for conveying information in the form of light pulses, typically in the realm of telecommunications, networking, and data transmission. The core of an optical fiber is the central region through which light travels. It is surrounded by a cladding layer that has a lower refractive index than...
    dark fiber
    Unused fiber; fiber that has been installed but reserved for future use. Carrying no light.
    Lawrence Berkeley National LaboratoryLBNLStanford Universityoptical fiberfiber opticsLasersdark fiberdata transmissiondistributed acoustic sensingDASseismic wavefieldsdistributed temperature sensingDTSsensingUniversity of California BerkeleyFiber Optics Special Section

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