On island of Vulcano, fiber optics become seismic sensors

On the island of Vulcano, off Sicily, fiber optic cables have become sensors for the seismic events associated with volcanic activity, enabling experts to monitor the area easier and faster, without installing costly instruments which are hard to manage. The finding, published in the journal Scientific Reports, was obtained by research coordinated by the National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) and carried out in collaboration with the University of Catania and the German Centre for Geoscientific Research (GFZ).

The researchers, led by Gilda Currenti, showed that fiber optics, with the help of the innovative algorithms of Artificial Intelligence (AI), can be a precious resource thanks to their capacity to acquire useful signals in giving rapid responses to volcanic crises. Using as a sensor the fiber optic telecommunication cable that links the island of Vulcano to Sicily, the researchers automatically detected the seismic events, acquiring data on almost 1,500 events in a month.

The huge quantity of data generated, equal to around 20 terabytes (20 billion bytes), posed a challenge also from the computer-technology standpoint: the authors of the study, taking advantage of the recent advances in the AI field, in fact developed new solutions to gather, manage and analyse enormous amounts of data