The use of fibre technologies for geophysical applications is expanding since few years. The design of highly sensitive sensors, such as rotational seismometers or strainmeters is one approach. In addition, initiatives such as SMART cables systems aim at piggy-backing environmental sensors onto submarine repeater units in order to improve sensor coverage across the oceans The use the fibre itself as a distribution of sensors for temperature or strain distributed sensing is an alternative. The vast majority of all telecommunications data (99%) transit through submarine and land-based fibre-optic cables. As the need for larger bandwidth and more rapid transmission has increased, so do the global networks of cables encircling the Earth. They now cover even remote regions of most continents and oceans. There have been significant advances in cable design and manufacturing technology, as well as cable deployment procedures. In very recent years there have been significant breakthroughs, applying techniques developed to interrogate the cables at very high precision over very large distances. For example, laser reflectometry using DAS (Distributed Acoustic Sensing) on both dedicated experimental and commercial fiber optic cables onshore and in submarine environment have successfully detected a variety of seismic sources (including ambient noise (microseism), local and teleseismic earthquakes, volcanic events, etc.). Other laser reflectometry techniques have long been used for monitoring of large-scale engineering infrastructures (dams, tunnels, bridges, pipelines, boreholes, etc.) and recently have been applied to natural hazard studies on land (monitoring of landslides or karst sinkholes) and have broader applications to the study of faults for instance. We welcome contributions that involve the application of fiber-optic cables or sensors in seismology, geodesy, geophysics, natural hazards, etc. from the laboratory to large-scale field tests.
We are delighted to have an Invited Speaker: Giuseppe Marra