A research team led by Jonathan Ajo-Franklin of Berkeley Lab’s Earth and Environmental Sciences Area (EESA) is turning parts of a 13,000-mile-long “dark fiber” testbed owned by DOE’s ESnet into a highly sensitive seismic activity sensor. L-R: Inder Monga (ESnet), Verónica Rodríguez Tribaldos (EESA), Jonathan Ajo-Franklin, and Nate Lindsey (EESA). (Credit: Paul Mueller/Berkeley Lab)
A research team led by EESA faculty scientist Jonathan Ajo-Franklin published a paper in Nature Scientific Reports that has been named one of the top 100 downloaded Earth science papers for the journal in 2019. Since its publication in February 2019, the paper, Distributed Acoustic Sensing Using Dark Fiber for Near-Surface Characterization and Broadband Seismic Event Detection, received 4,932 article downloads. Scientific Reports published more than 769 Earth science papers in 2019, making this level of interest in the Ajo-Franklin’s team’s paper an extraordinary achievement.
Their study detailed their work turning parts of a 13,000-mile-long testbed of “dark fiber,” unused fiber-optic cable, owned by the DOE Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), into a highly sensitive seismic activity sensor that could potentially augment the performance of earthquake early warning systems currently being developed in the western United States. The researchers ran their experiments on a 20-mile segment of the 13,000-mile-long ESnet Dark Fiber Testbed that extends from West Sacramento to Woodland, California.
Read more about the work here.