Every major city these days has optical fiber networks buried all over the place carrying data. Researchers at Stanford want to use these optical fibers to double up as seismic sensors for monitoring and studying earthquakes. For people in earthquake prone areas this could really aid in predicting when the big one is about to hit.



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.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Stanford Researchers Build an Earthquake Observatory With Optical Fibers