Using the internet to detect earthquakes?

[WMGroomAK]

Originally saw the link for this over on HardOCP and as a geologist, thought the concept sounded interesting so pulled up the article.  A Geophysicist over at Stanford has developed a method to turn existing fiber optic infrastructure into a massive seismic network in order to create a higher density sensor.  The technique works by measuring the backscatter signals from the fiber optic cable to measure the vibrations and strain on the cable.  So far, they have run a trial using a 3-mile figure 8 loop on the Stanford campus and have been able to pick up small local tremblors as well as the recent Mexico earthquake.  The array, while not as sensitive as a standard seismograph, can be used to distinguish between a magnitude 1.6 and 1.8 earthquake as well as pick up the different P and S waves.  The biggest benefit from this is that the cost of using the existing infrastructure of fiber optic internet to establish this sort of network is less than installing seismometers, which can lead to more data and better coverage of cities.

 

3-mile fiber loop used for testing

 

https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2017/10/19/building-billionr-optical-fibers/

Quote

Thousands of miles of buried optical fibers crisscross California’s San Francisco Bay Area delivering high-speed internet and HD video to homes and businesses.

Biondo Biondi, a professor of geophysics at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, dreams of turning that dense network into an inexpensive “billion sensors” observatory for continuously monitoring and studying earthquakes.

Over the past year, Biondi’s group has shown that it’s possible to convert the jiggles of perturbed optical fiber strands into information about the direction and magnitude of seismic events.

The researchers have been recording those seismic jiggles in a 3-mile loop of optical fiber installed beneath the Stanford University campus with instruments called laser interrogators provided by the company OptaSense, which is a co-author on publications about the research.

“We can continuously listen to – and hear well – the Earth using preexisting optical fibers that have been deployed for telecom purposes,” Biondi said.

Currently researchers monitor earthquakes with seismometers, which are more sensitive than the proposed telecom array, but their coverage is sparse and they can be challenging and expensive to install and maintain, especially in urban areas.

By contrast, a seismic observatory like the one Biondi proposes would be relatively inexpensive to operate. “Every meter of optical fiber in our network acts like a sensor and costs less than a dollar to install,” Biondi said. “You will never be able to create a network using conventional seismometers with that kind of coverage, density and price.”

Such a network would allow scientists to study earthquakes, especially smaller ones, in greater detail and pinpoint their sources more quickly than is currently possible. Greater sensor coverage would also enable higher resolution measurements of ground responses to shaking.

“Civil engineers could take what they learn about how buildings and bridges respond to small earthquakes from the billion-sensors array and use that information to design buildings that can withstand greater shaking,” said Eileen Martin, a graduate student in Biondi’s lab.

...

“How DAS works is that as the light travels along the fiber, it encounters various impurities in the glass and bounces back,” Martin said. “If the fiber were totally stationary, that ‘backscatter’ signal would always look the same. But if the fiber starts to stretch in some areas — due to vibrations or strain — the signal changes.”

Previous implementation of this kind of acoustic sensing, however, required optical fibers to be expensively affixed to a surface or encased in cement to maximize contact with the ground and ensure the highest data quality. In contrast, Biondi’s project under Stanford — dubbed the fiber optic seismic observatory — employs the same optical fibers as telecom companies, which lie unsecured and free-floating inside hollow plastic piping.

...

But since the fiber optic seismic observatory at Stanford began operation in September 2016, it has recorded and cataloged more than 800 events, ranging from manmade events and small, barely felt local temblors to powerful, deadly catastrophes like the recent earthquakes that struck more than 2,000 miles away in Mexico. In one particularly revealing experiment, the underground array picked up signals from two small local earthquakes with magnitudes of 1.6 and 1.8.

“As expected, both earthquakes had the same waveform, or pattern, because they originated from the same place, but the amplitude of the bigger quake was larger,” Biondi said. “This demonstrates that fiber optic seismic observatory can correctly distinguish between different magnitude quakes.”

Crucially, the array also detected and distinguished between two different types of waves that travel through the Earth, called P and S waves. “One of our goals is to contribute to an early earthquake warning system. That will require the ability to detect P waves, which are generally less damaging that S waves but arrive much earlier,” Martin said

While this is not as sensitive as a standard Seismometer network, I could definitely see this as being useful in large urban environments, especially for mapping out the substrate material of the cities, engineering more earthquake proof structures and potentially providing for a possible early warning system (although that part may be very limited in capability).

 

HardOCP Link: https://www.hardocp.com/news/2017/10/23/stanford_researchers_build_earthquake_observatory_optical_fibers

[moltencrystal]

thats pretty damned cool !

[Unhelpful]

That's fucking awesome! I love seeing unrelated, but incredibly useful, technology tacked onto already-existing infrastructure.

[Input_Name_Here]

25 minutes ago, WMGroomAK said:

Originally saw the link for this over on HardOCP and as a geologist, thought the concept sounded interesting so pulled up the article.  A Geophysicist over at Stanford has developed a method to turn existing fiber optic infrastructure into a massive seismic network in order to create a higher density sensor.  The technique works by measuring the backscatter signals from the fiber optic cable to measure the vibrations and strain on the cable.  So far, they have run a trial using a 3-mile figure 8 loop on the Stanford campus and have been able to pick up small local tremblors as well as the recent Mexico earthquake.  The array, while not as sensitive as a standard seismograph, can be used to distinguish between a magnitude 1.6 and 1.8 earthquake as well as pick up the different P and S waves.  The biggest benefit from this is that the cost of using the existing infrastructure of fiber optic internet to establish this sort of network is less than installing seismometers, which can lead to more data and better coverage of cities.

 

3-mile fiber loop used for testing

 

https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2017/10/19/building-billionr-optical-fibers/

While this is not as sensitive as a standard Seismometer network, I could definitely see this as being useful in large urban environments, especially for mapping out the substrate material of the cities, engineering more earthquake proof structures and potentially providing for a possible early warning system (although that part may be very limited in capability).

 

HardOCP Link: https://www.hardocp.com/news/2017/10/23/stanford_researchers_build_earthquake_observatory_optical_fibers

That is really cool!!!! but limited in capability as an early warning system because earthquake waves travel so fast. On the other hand, it only takes a few seconds for people to hear an alarm and duck under a table. 

[mynameisjuan]

Really cool. But earthquakes move so fast that by the time these alarms hit its too late to do much. 

 

Also I wonder if this was discovered by having a dirty cable and started to notice the light readings bounce all over the place.

[Bcat00]

As neat as this is, this aint happening unless they get government funding to put up the needed equipment even if its built on existing infrastructure.

[vanished]

if I was asked to do that, I'd set up a website called "didyoufeelanearthquake.com" and it would just log people clicking "yes" or "no" and their location based on IP

[WMGroomAK]

3 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

if I was asked to do that, I'd set up a website called "didyoufeelanearthquake.com" and it would just log people clicking "yes" or "no" and their location based on IP

Something like this?

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/data/dyfi/

 

Is actually fairly useful for collecting data after the fact on felt seismicity vs registered seismicity. (At least in the US).   

[vanished]

Just now, WMGroomAK said:

Something like this?

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/data/dyfi/

 

Is actually fairly useful for collecting data after the fact on felt seismicity vs registered seismicity. (At least in the US).   

I guess, but much simpler.  I'm picturing "did you feel an earthquake?" in big text centred at the top, with two big buttons under it, "yes" and "no", and then under that, a map of the world with a heatmap of reports in the last 24 hours, and under that a slider to go back in time.  Just the essentials

[RadiatingLight]

40 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I guess, but much simpler.  I'm picturing "did you feel an earthquake?" in big text centred at the top, with two big buttons under it, "yes" and "no", and then under that, a map of the world with a heatmap of reports in the last 24 hours, and under that a slider to go back in time.  Just the essentials

but that wouldn't give any magnitude.

 

this can distinguish a 1.6 from a 1.8, so it's actually really accurate, considering that richer scale is logarithmic. ( so being sensitive enough to differentiate 1.6 to 1.8 means that it can differentiate 4.016 to 4.018, which is more than enough. 
(I think my math was right, but don't count on it.)

[vanished]

3 minutes ago, RadiatingLight said:

but that wouldn't give any magnitude.

 

this can distinguish a 1.6 from a 1.8, so it's actually really accurate, considering that richer scale is logarithmic. ( so being sensitive enough to differentiate 1.6 to 1.8 means that it can differentiate 4.016 to 4.018, which is more than enough. 
(I think my math was right, but don't count on it.)

I'd make a new scale = the number of people who say "yes"

also I think your math was backwards.,  If we "re-linearize" the scale, 1.6 and 1.8 work out to numbers that seem farther apart than 1.6 and 1.8, not closer together.

[WMGroomAK]

1 hour ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I'm picturing "did you feel an earthquake?" in big text centred at the top, with two big buttons under it, "yes" and "no", and then under that, a map of the world with a heatmap of reports in the last 24 hours, and under that a slider to go back in time.  Just the essentials

That might be interesting as a mobile app concept if the app was allowed GPS access and could provide some kind of context such as knowing whether you were in a building and which floor you were on...  Of course, I would probably design the app to rate more on the Modified Mercalli Scale of I thru X how severe was the motion you felt thru a slider... 

[vanished]

1 minute ago, WMGroomAK said:

That might be interesting as a mobile app concept if the app was allowed GPS access and could provide some kind of context such as knowing whether you were in a building and which floor you were on...  Of course, I would probably design the app to rate more on the Modified Mercalli Scale of I thru X how severe was the motion you felt thru a slider... 

eh, people will each rate how strong it was differently since it's subjective, but that gives me an idea.  Just use the phone's accelerometer.  So long as they can detect when it's resting flat on something and not being moved by a person so it knows what movements are actually of interest, there would potentially be a lot of data collectors out there especially if it strikes at night.

[WMGroomAK]

6 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

eh, people will each rate how strong it was differently since it's subjective, but that gives me an idea.  Just use the phone's accelerometer.  So long as they can detect when it's resting flat on something and not being moved by a person so it knows what movements are actually of interest, there would potentially be a lot of data collectors out there especially if it strikes at night

Definitely a subjective evaluation, which is kind of how the Mercalli system is setup is to measure felt intensity of the earthquake, where as Richter and Moment Magnitude scales are both based on the amount of energy released as opposed to perceived intensity.  Something that is always a bit interesting is to look at the differences between the 'Did You Feel It' results and the Shakemap results for the earthquakes that the USGS posts online.  The Shakemaps tend to color out the areas using intensity and base their intensity measurements on Peak Acceleration (%g) and Peak Velocity (cm/s), where as the DYFI maps are more based on reports of damage perceived by people reporting.  

 

Of course a phone's accelerometer would hopefully be able to detect peak acceleration and velocity, although I'm unsure how high that would go and under a Scale X+ earthquake I'm not sure I want my phone accelerating at over 156 g's and travelling at over 160 cm/s across the desk. 

 

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/

 

 

[mr moose]

9 hours ago, mynameisjuan said:

Really cool. But earthquakes move so fast that by the time these alarms hit its too late to do much. 

 

Also I wonder if this was discovered by having a dirty cable and started to notice the light readings bounce all over the place.

Not quite, they use p-wave detectors in Japan. They have actually saved quite a few lives as the Bullet trains automatically stop when they are tripped.

 

http://www.railway-technology.com/features/feature122751/

 

 

[NumLock21]

I like how nobody cared about it at HardOCP. This is why this forum is the best, always get replies.

[Bananasplit_00]

interesting tech, so now we are using fibre cable to detect earthquakes while i cant afford to even get it to my door even though it runs just a meter outside the lawn...

[Trik'Stari]

I was expecting PCI-Ex16 seismographs.

 

I am disappointed.

[Input_Name_Here]

On 10/23/2017 at 6:49 PM, Ryan_Vickers said:

I guess, but much simpler.  I'm picturing "did you feel an earthquake?" in big text centred at the top, with two big buttons under it, "yes" and "no", and then under that, a map of the world with a heatmap of reports in the last 24 hours, and under that a slider to go back in time.  Just the essentials

The country with the most semi trucks, mining, and Harleys would be lit up in all red 

[Input_Name_Here]

On 10/24/2017 at 5:56 AM, Trik'Stari said:

I was expecting PCI-Ex16 seismographs.

 

I am disappointed.

Nah, but we were thinking along the lines of using those useful floppy connectors

[Gravesnear]

On 10/23/2017 at 12:56 PM, WMGroomAK said:

[]

That is cool as hell! There's going to be so much more data!

[vanished]

4 hours ago, Input_Name_Here said:

The country with the most semi trucks, mining, and Harleys would be lit up in all red 

I suppose that's true

[WMGroomAK]

1 hour ago, Gravesnear said:

That is cool as hell! There's going to be so much more data!

Well, since they would be along fiber lines, at least there would be an easy fast connection available to send the data along. 

[vanished]

1 hour ago, Gravesnear said:

That is cool as hell! There's going to be so much more data!

meh, how many places actually have fibre?

[WereCat]

On 24. 10. 2017 at 10:56 AM, Trik'Stari said:

I was expecting PCI-Ex16 seismographs.

 

I am disappointed.

"Using earthquakes as a VPN"