News Finding: Lindsey added: "Fiber has a lot of implications for earthquake detection, location, and early warning.
Paper Finding: Time-for-distance conversion allows strain signals to be recorded at spatially localized regions of the fiber, hence transforming the cable into a densely sampled sensor array.
News Context: Additionally, fiber allows for dense spatial sampling, meaning data points are only meters apart, whereas seismometers typically are separated by many kilometers. Lindsey added: "Fiber has a lot of implications for earthquake detection, location, and early warning. Fiber goes out in the ocean, and it's all over the land, so this technology increases the likelihood that a sensor is near the rupture when an earthquake happens, which translates into finding small events, improved earthquake locations, and extra time for early warning."
Paper Context: As a result, DAS offers new opportunities for seismic monitoring of the near surface. Time-for-distance conversion allows strain signals to be recorded at spatially localized regions of the fiber, hence transforming the cable into a densely sampled sensor array. DAS generates digital waveforms that are familiar to seismic practitioners, but because DAS is a distributed sensor, waveforms obtained at each channel are not a point measurement but are strains measured over a spatial distance.