Thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables, already in place across California, can shake up the study of earthquakes.
New research out of Caltech used a section of telecommunication fiber to sense and measure a magnitude 6 earthquake, repurposing the assemblies to extract sharper details about the temblor.
Zhongwen Zhan, professor of physics at Caltech, said the same fiber optic network used for internet and television can serve as a dense network of makeshift seismometers in a method called DAS, distributed acoustic sensing.
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