Successful Deployment of a 21km SMART Cable with Force-Feedback Seismometer and Accelerometers in the Mediterranean Sea

Autonomous Ocean Bottom Seismometer (OBS) deployments have often involved a degree of “drop-and-hope” due to the inherent lack of seismic data communication during installation as well as waiting extended periods before data collection. Cabled solutions provide real-time data during and immediately after deployment, sometimes with opportunity to adjust the instrument before it is left to operate remotely. However, cabled solutions are inherently financially and logistically challenging both in terms of seismic hardware and arguably more significantly, deployment hardware (ships, ROVs, cables etc.). The geographical reach of these experiments is also often limited to within a few hundred kilometres of the coast. These constraints often mean cabled OBS are beyond the scope of most scientific bodies.

Güralp Systems Limited, in collaboration with the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), has successfully manufactured and demonstrated a method of reducing financial and logistical constraints, extending geographical range, and crucially maintaining data quality by utilising force-feedback seismic instrumentation in cabled OBS systems. The recent successful deployment of the InSEA Wet Demo SMART (Science Monitoring And Reliable Telecommunications) cable, off the coast of Sicily, displays a world first in how science can partner with industry to achieve this.

SMART cables are primarily telecommunication cables that secondarily serve as hosts for scientific monitoring equipment. Commercial viability for these systems relies on the cable being laid as if the science element did not exist, thereby minimising additional deployment costs and reducing barriers to cooperation with cable laying companies. Güralp and INGV deployed 3 seismometer-accelerometer pairs housed inline within the cable repeater housings along the 21km cable length using standard cable-laying techniques to show proof of concept. The system also features a series of high-performance temperature and pressure sensors that can be used for larger scale oceanographic monitoring.

This pioneering installation using telecommunication cables marks a significant step towards drastically improving local knowledge of inaccessible oceanic regions as well as global azimuthal coverage for teleseismic events, all in real time.