Sea ice tracked with fibre-optic sensors

The deployment demonstrates a new way to monitor ice formation in a region where ice coverage has economic, cultural and biological importance, researchers said at the Seismological Society of America’s Annual Meeting.

In a statement, Michael Baker of Sandia National Laboratories said: “At a global scale, the annual increase and decrease of fluctuations in sea ice is a good metric for determining the overall health of the Arctic.”

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) uses internal flaws in a long optical fibre as thousands of seismic sensors. An interrogator at one end of the fibre sends laser pulses down the cable that are reflected off the fibre flaws and reflected back to the instrument. When the fibre is disturbed, researchers can examine changes in the timing of the reflected pulses to learn more about the resulting seismic waves.