A hidden community of underwater fibre optic cables might supply unprecedented new insights into the lives of a number of the world’s most threatened and elusive sea creatures.
That’s the hope of researchers from the College of Washington, US, who’ve laid 1.25 miles of cable throughout Puget Sound, simply south of the Canadian border, to listen in on the area’s endangered southern resident orcas.
The approach, generally known as distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), works by firing laser pulses by means of the fibre optic cables and analysing tiny disturbances attributable to vibrations and sound. It’s already been used to watch earthquakes and in recent times has proved adept in detecting marine mammals.
Now the College of Washington’s Dr Shima Abadi hopes to make use of DAS to trace orcas by mapping the distinctive clicks they make as they hunt and navigate. If profitable, the system might present early warnings to ships to decelerate or steer clear, decreasing the danger of disturbing or injuring the whales. Scaled up, the method might faucet into the 870,000 miles of fibre optic cable criss-crossing the planet’s oceans.
“This modern method might be a break-through in conservation efforts and open new potentialities to develop evaluation on a a lot bigger temporal and spatial scale,” stated Abadi.
Important picture: Vidar Nordli-Mathisen
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