SUBMERSE: Exploring the planet with live submarine telecommunications cables.

The integration of state-of-the-art fibre optic sensing technologies with telecommunication systems has not yet been achieved. There are many challenges which need to be overcome to allow for a pan-continental research instrument, all of which requires international collaboration. Such international collaborations would allow for the creation of novel applications and research into Earth science, such as cetology and abiotic and biotic marine interactions, oceanography, seismology, volcanology, and soundscape monitoring, to name but a few.

Over the past 5 years, research teams from National seismic and oceanographic infrastructures, together with National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), and partners from universities, research institutes and industry have pioneered sensing techniques to use submarine optical telecommunication fibres to monitor the Earth and its systems.

Fibre sensing technology and collaborations created by developing these techniques have now reached a level where a new paradigm shift can occur. This presentation will discuss the SUBMERSE project (SUBMarinE cables for ReSearch and Exploration), which is creating and delivering a pilot research instrument which could serve as a blueprint for continuous monitoring upon many more existing submarine fibre optic cables in the future.

The SUBMERSE project, which started in May 2023, is a Horizon Europe-funded, 36-month long initiative which is investigating the combined acquisition of SOP (State-of-Polarisation) and DAS (Distributed Acoustic Sensing) data from live telecom cables, with the aim to then make that data available to researchers globally and F.A.I.R. The project team, consisting of 24 organisations, uses existing fibre-optic infrastructure deployed across multiple national research infrastructures to create a pan-European research instrument.

Our presentation will discuss the latest field deployments of DAS and SOP technologies across 5 geographic locations on 3 cable systems, which are spread across the European continent and Atlantic Ocean. It will offer a first glimpse of the effects of running a DAS in the L-and C- Bands on a live DWDM telecoms system, in combination with SOP, in a submarine and terrestrial environment.

The aim of the SUBMERSE project is to disseminate the data following FAIR principles through established community data centres. The main challenges we have faced relate to ensuring compliance to security restrictions and handling huge data quantities generated by DAS.  The approaches to down sampling, frequency filtering, and potentially time-and-space-gating will also be presented.  We will discuss the approaches taken for acquiring, streaming from remote sites, data staging, pre-processing and raw file retention. We will also highlight the tools and approaches that we have adopted to develop best practices for running such a multi-national, distributed, sensing instrument which must take these elements into account.

Our work has shown that a pragmatic approach, with collaboration at heart, is needed to address these challenges. Without a strong commitment and collaboration between research communities and research infrastructure providers, the potential to lose valuable research data is high. This risk can be mitigated by focusing on datasets which are valuable to communities and ensuring the long-term availability of those data sets in a F.A.I.R manner.