“We don’t know how the plates beneath the ocean really behave,” a professor of geophysics said. Underwater cables could change that.
Somewhere beneath the Adriatic Sea, a rogue block of the African tectonic plate is burrowing under southern Europe, stretching Italy eastward by a few millimetres each year. On October 26, 2016, the stress triggered an earthquake in the Apennine Mountains, one in a series of quakes which toppled buildings in Italian towns.
Marra was not the first scientist to consider the earthquake-sensing potential of undersea cables. An older method called Distributed Acoustic Sensing, for example, analyzes the light that reflects off imperfections in glass fibres, and has been used to sense earthquakes and map microfaults. But D.A.S. has a crucial limitation: it can only provide data near the ends of each cable.
The areas where oceanic plates dive beneath continents, known as underwater subduction zones, are particularly mysterious, Zhan said. Many of the worst earthquakes happen there, and the zones often run parallel to densely inhabited coastlines, for hundreds of miles. “We suspect that earthquakes in the ocean are fundamentally different from the ones we have on land,” Zhan said.
Even then, cables provided an unexpected window into hidden parts of the planet. At the time, naturalists believed that the deep sea was a barren wasteland; based on a fruitless sampling effort in the Aegean Sea, the renowned naturalist Edward Forbes calculated that life could not exist underwater below a depth of about five hundred metres. However, in 1860, an engineer hoisted a broken telegraph cable out of the Mediterranean and found animals affixed to it.
Bruce Howe, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii, has been adding scientific instruments to seafloor cables since the early nineteen-nineties. Telecom companies lay new cables roughly once every quarter century to preëmpt disruptions and incorporate more advanced materials. “Whenever a company decides to turn their cable system off, instead of abandoning it in place, as was done in those days, we thought science could use it,” he told me.
“The only business reason for these cables to exist, as far as we are concerned, is for data connectivity,” Bikash Koley, the vice-president of global networking at Google, which has laid long stretches of cable in partnership with telecom carriers, told me. The company has no intention of adding instruments to its cables, he said.
“They’re motivated,” Howe told me. “They see this in terms not just of telecom operational costs but in human costs, and it may take governments to really balance these kinds of considerations. Companies aren’t going to do that.” The Portuguese government has approved the project, and Howe expects the appropriation of at least a hundred and twenty million euros to happen sometime this year.
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