A team of seismologists along with experts from Google have produced a system that detects earthquakes by using existing submarine communication cables that lay in our oceans.

According to Caltech, which is a science and engineering institute, the team studied the Curie Cable. This is a cable that runs from Los Angeles to Valparaiso in Chile.

By analysing the polarisation of the pulses of light through this cable, the team detected 20 moderate-to-large earthquakes over a period of nine months, including a magnitude-7.7 earthquake in January 2020.

This research has been led by Zhongwen Zhan, an assistant professor of geophysics at Caltech. He believes that this technique could even detect tsunamis over time and act as a warning system.

“This new technique can really convert the majority of submarine cables into geophysical sensors that are thousands of kilometers long to detect earthquakes and possibly tsunamis in the future,” says Zhan.

“We believe this is the first solution for monitoring seismicity on the ocean floor that could feasibly be implemented around the world. It could complement the existing network of ground-based seismometers and tsunami-monitoring buoys to make the detection of submarine earthquakes and tsunamis much faster in many cases.”

The team will now focus on developing a machine learning algorithm that can perform detections that ignore outside disturbances such as ships or crabs which can move a cable when collecting data.