Why Japanese researchers are looking to submarine cables for faster tsunami warnings
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A map of the dozens of submarine communication cables branching off from Japan — with its numerous colorful lines darting this way and that depicting connections between Japan’s islands and the rest of the world — is a reminder of how interconnected the planet has become.
But this ever-expanding network of data transmission may also hold the key to a possible new method of detecting the most destructive natural disasters, Tonegawa explains.
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Tonegawa and his research point to two significant advantages that DAS has over more conventional tools like seismographs and pressure gauges.
First, governments and companies around the world have already laid 1.4 million km of cables on the seafloor — although Tonegawa notes that DAS cannot be deployed on the entire length of a cable — and partnering with those entities could significantly help ensure a wide rollout of the system. Second, fiber optic cables are divided into channels that are typically just meters apart, and strain can be measured on each channel, a vast improvement over the tens of kilometers-wide spatial gaps between conventional tools.
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