The University of Michigan professor explains how existing fiber-optic networks can double as real-time sensors for earthquakes, tsunamis, and ocean activity.
Subsea internet cables carry roughly 95 percent of global data traffic. But seismologist Zack Spica believes they could double as a real-time sensing system for the planet., has spent over 15 years working on distributed acoustic sensing .
Through his startup Lumetec, he is now applying AI to monitor subsea cables and detect earthquakes, tsunamis, and other ocean activity.Zack Spica: I’m a seismologist by training, so I study waves for a living. I’ve largely worked in academia. I completed my PhD in geophysics, then moved to Stanford for a long postdoc in oil and gas, where I was introduced toIn 2013, I moved to Tokyo for another postdoc, and later joined the University of Michigan as an assistant professor. Then two years ago, I decided to start my own company to apply the knowledge and findings I’ve built over years of research.I think a lot of our paths are shaped by childhood experiences. My father was a marbler, so I grew up surrounded by rocks, beautiful granites and materials like that, which sparked my interest in earth science. From there, as I progressed through my studies, I gradually gravitated toward seismology. You’ve moved from Mexico to Stanford, Tokyo and now the University of Michigan. How has it shaped your perspective? I’m originally from Belgium, where I completed my undergrad and master’s. Then I moved to Mexico. From a research perspective, it’s highly valuable to experience different approaches and ways of thinking. The way research is done in Mexico versus Stanford, for example, is very different. You learn something at every step. These experiences gave me a diverse background and opened my mind to new questions and discoveries.I was lucky to be at Stanford when this field really started taking off. Fiber optic sensing in earth and environmental science grew out of theThey were among the first to expand it to broader applications, so I was fortunate to be early in working on these questions, and I’ve continued ever since. When I moved to Japan, I came across available data that no one was working on. I approached a professor and asked if I could work on subsea applications, and that’s really how it all continued.The technology has improved significantly over the years and continues to evolve rapidly. For example, around 2012-2013, the distance you could sample over a telecom fiber was about 15 to 18 miles . Today it’s closer to 124 miles . That’s an order-of-magnitude increase in range, as well as improvements in sensitivity and resolution. The instruments we used a decade ago would look almost prehistoric today. It’s a fast-moving field, both in terms of hardware and data processing.Your research focuses on turning fiber-optic cables into seismic sensors. How does this technology actually work? Basically, a fiber is simply designed to carry light. By sending pulses at different frequencies, you can transmit a huge amount of information. With fiber optic sensing, we analyze that light differently. We focus on properties that aren’t directly used in telecommunications, including backscattered light, or how the light reflects back to the source. This helps us infer how the fiber is moving, stretching or deforming along its length., have been known for over a century. What’s changed is the technology. Today we have highly stable, powerful lasers and advanced computing. We can interrogate the light at very high sampling rates and extract real-time data about the fiber’s behavior. It’s the hardware that lets us apply it in entirely new ways.Nearly 95 percent of global internet traffic travels through subsea cables. Why are they such valuable scientific tools? Yes. The telecom industry has spent hundreds of billions of dollars laying the fiber optics network down. Yet, it’s primarilyHow sensitive are these fiber-optic cables? What kinds of events can they detect? It’s a surprisingly exciting technology. The deeper you go into the data, the more you realize how sensitive it is. In one paper a few years ago, for example, we were able to detect the sound of a bubble moving near the fiber. That shows the level of sensitivity. The bubble was only a few meters away, but even its acoustic signal created enough deformation to be detected in the light traveling through the fiber. Beyond that, the applications are wide-ranging: earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, ocean currents, temperature changes, many processes at the ocean floor can now be monitored over long periods using this infrastructure.If we look at earthquakes, the vast majority of large ones, magnitude 8 or higher, occur offshore, typically at plate boundaries like subduction zones, often 93 to 186 miles from shore. Now, the best we can do is early warning. If an earthquake happens offshore near Mexico, about 248 miles from the trench, there are a few tens of seconds before seismic waves arrive, allowing time to send alerts. But since most sensors are on land, we’re already reacting late. If we place sensors in the ocean, closer to where earthquakes originate, we can gain those crucial extra seconds. And for large earthquakes, even a few seconds can save lives.I realized telecon fiber owners and their engineers had very little visibility into what’s happening along the fiber. The current approach is mostly preventive at installation: you do a desktop study to choose the safest route, sometimes bury the fiber or add protective layers. But that’s expensive, so it’s usually only done near the coast. After that, it’s essentially installed and left for 20 years. The industry is largely reactive rather than proactive. When a fiber breaks, and most will at some point, it’s repaired, often at a cost of millions or even tens of millions of dollars. With fiber optic sensing, we can add a proactive, digital layer of protection. It allows operators to monitor movement, detect potential threats, and, if damage occurs, pinpoint exactly what happened, where, and when. That’s critical, because when a fiber breaks, operators often don’t know why. This makes it difficult to assign responsibility and recover costs.Automatic Identification System , which provides vessel data like identity and position, updated every few minutes. By combining these data streams with AI algorithms, we can detect and identify potential threats in real time.I’m convinced that fiber optic sensing will become part of daily life within the next decade. Its applications are broad, from asset protection, , to border security, traffic monitoring and smart cities. For instance, it can track vehicle speeds over long distances, even in remote areas where fiber already exists. In that sense, the fiber network can become a large-scale sensing system for societal benefit. I see this development as unstoppable. That said, there are still technical and policy challenges to overcome. But ultimately, what we’re building is necessary, so there’s no reason it won’t continue to grow.It’s still a bit of a gray area. Right now, there’s essentially no clear policy around it, so it will be interesting to see how things evolve.There are many directions to go, it’s really a never-ending project. As we collect more data, we continuously retrain our, and improve accuracy and precision. We also learn from our customers, whose feedback helps shape our roadmap and refine what we build.You’ll always have work. Even with today’s AI tools automating many tasks, this remains a highly complex engineering and scientific challenge. AI can support the process, but it still requires human expertise to understand the data and interpret it correctly, and we’re far from fully automating that. We’re talking about transforming the world’s largest infrastructure into a sensing system. That won’t be done by a handful of people. It will rather require an entire ecosystem of engineers tackling challenges across multiple sectors, from traffic monitoring and smart cities to border security and beyond.Based in Skopje, North Macedonia. Her work has appeared in Daily Mail, Mirror, Daily Star, Yahoo, NationalWorld, Newsweek, Press Gazette and others. She covers stories on batteries, wind energy, sustainable shipping and new discoveries. When she's not chasing the next big science story, she's traveling, exploring new cultures, or enjoying good food with even better wine.InterviewsInterviewsInterviews
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