Putting Cables on Ocean Floor Could Shed Light on Earthquakes, Tsunamis

Scientific instruments could be embedded in thousands of miles of communications cables running across the Pacific Ocean floor in the future, bringing researchers new data on undersea earthquakes and tsunamis, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography announced today.

Scripps is in the early stages of negotiations with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the commercial telecommunications company TE SubCom on the idea.

The seismometers, pressure gauges and temperature sensors could relay data regarding temblors, tsunamis and various undersea forces, according to
Scripps officials, who said later instruments could measure ocean water
temperatures.

The instruments could be deployed first on 12,950 miles of cable to be
laid between Los Angeles, Auckland, New Zealand and Sydney, Australia, according to John Orcutt, of the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Scripps.

“More than 70 percent of the world is water and we need to understand
much more of it,” Orcutt said. “If this project expands to other oceans it
could change the face of oceanography.”

Scripps envisions that once deployed, the data generated by the
instruments would be available to scientists around the world. 

— City News Service