Distributed sensing of microseisms and teleseisms with submarine dark fibers

Abstract

AbstractSparse seismic instrumentation in the oceans limits our understanding of deep Earth dynamics and submarine earthquakes. Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), an emerging technology that converts optical fiber to seismic sensors, allows us to leverage pre-existing submarine telecommunication cables for seismic monitoring. Here we report observations of microseism, local surface gravity waves, and a teleseismic earthquake along a 4192-sensor ocean-bottom DAS array offshore Belgium. We observe in-situ how opposing groups of ocean surface gravity waves generate double-frequency seismic Scholte waves, as described by the Longuet-Higgins theory of microseism generation. We also extract P- and S-wave phases from the 2018-08-19$${M}_{w}8.2$$Mw8.2Fiji deep earthquake in the 0.01-1 Hz frequency band, though waveform fidelity is low at high frequencies. These results suggest significant potential of DAS in next-generation submarine seismic networks.