These Underwater Cables Can Improve Tsunami Detection
upstart writes:
The residents of Vanuatu, a clutch of islands in the South Pacific, are no strangers to flooding. The ocean floor around them is frequently shaken by tsunami-triggering earthquakes.
Some advance warning could give residents enough time to get to higher ground before tsunamis strike, saving lives. But the world's 65 active deep-ocean buoys, which are designed to detect the waves, are too sparsely distributed to provide that type of warning for Vanuatu.
The Joint Task Force for Science Monitoring and Reliable Telecommunications (SMART) Subsea Cables, a United Nations initiative, aims to solve that problem by equipping new commercial undersea telecom cables with simple sensors that measure pressure, acceleration, and temperature. The sensors could be added to the fiber-optic cables' signal repeaters-the watertight cylinders full of equipment that are used to amplify signals every 50 kilometers or so. With cables providing for the sensors' power and data transfer needs, scientists could collect information about the seafloor at an unprecedented scale-and pass on data about potential tsunamis far faster than is currently possible.
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