Scientists Saw an Earthquake in Incredible Detail—Using Telecom Cables Fiber optics that connect the world can detect its earthquakes, too

Our paper was recently featured in Scientific American. They made a neat graphic for it, too. Check it out: www.scientificamerican.com/article/tele...

New paper in Science! We used a fiber-optic array to tackle the tricky problem of imaging an offshore earthquake (2024 M7 Mendocino Fault EQ). In the process, we learned new things about supershear transitions and how fiber arrays could help with EEW. Read more here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New paper in Science! We used a fiber-optic array to tackle the tricky problem of imaging an offshore earthquake (2024 M7 Mendocino Fault EQ). In the process, we learned new things about supershear transitions and how fiber arrays could help with EEW. Read more here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Wonderful popular science article on using buried fibers to do interesting science. There’s also a nice description of my work at Caltech imaging the SoCal Moho and of what we’re trying to do at the USGS with a fiber in southern Cascadia. Worth a read!

Thanks! :)

Indeed! And thanks; it is what it is. The community is being really gracious and supportive.

Thanks, Sue! I know there are groups at Penn State and MIT using local fibers. To my knowledge, they’ve been looking at ambient wavefields and mine blasts. I’m unaware of groups probing fibers in places like the NMSZ. There are some great targets! Need a fiber, an interrogator, and data storage :).

Thanks, Eli! You’ve done an excellent job with this :). This work is a super important development towards using fibers to monitor active volcanic processes.

Constraining Dike Opening Models With Seismic Velocity Changes Associated With the 2023–2024 Eruption Sequence on the Reykjanes Peninsula Subsurface deformation associated with the 2023–2024 eruption sequence on the Reykjanes Peninsula produces a pronounced dv/v signal The observed dv/v signal is inverted for a model of dike-openin...

New paper in AGU Advances! We constrained models of dike opening in the recent Icelandic eruptions through observations of dv/v on DAS.

Thank you to the many co-authors who made it possible, especially my advisor Zhongwen Zhan.

agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

New paper out! Last chapter of my PhD. We made a long-term seismicity and MT catalog for Ridgecrest using a state-of-the-art workflow. We then used the catalog to make new insights on the stress evolution throughout the sequence using point process theory. Check it out here: doi.org/10.1093/gji/...

New paper out! Last chapter of my PhD. We made a long-term seismicity and MT catalog for Ridgecrest using a state-of-the-art workflow. We then used the catalog to make new insights on the stress evolution throughout the sequence using point process theory. Check it out here: doi.org/10.1093/gji/...

Ah, I’m very sorry for your loss. It sounds like he was a wonderful scientist, educator, and person. And that he left a great legacy.

No problem! Just finished my phd at Caltech. Now a postdoc with the usgs.

Yep, I think you may be thinking of this paper from the same group: doi.org/10.1126/scia.... Same technology used to make the measurements, but they used tomography to image the magma chamber under the long valley caldera. These units use single freq. narrow linewidth lasers.

New Technique to Look Deep Within Tectonic Plates New technology makes it possible and affordable to image Earth’s crust–mantle boundary at very high resolution.

Nice overview of our recent paper for Caltech news:

Fine-scale Southern California Moho structure uncovered with distributed acoustic sensing The Moho reflected phase measured by DAS shows abrupt crustal thickness changes across the Garlock Fault and Coso Volcanic Field.

DAS meets the Moho! New paper in Science Advances w/ Zhongwen Zhan. We developed a method for finding Moho reflections in DAS data. One event can yield 10s of km of fine-scale Moho depth measurements. We applied it to dozens of SoCal events and learned a lot about the Garlock, Coso, and more.

With these observations we can do all sorts of interesting science. We use these measurements to invert for fine-scale profiles of Moho depth throughout SoCal. We find that the Garlock Fault penetrates the mantle and offsets the Moho. We also see a “Moho plateau” under the Coso Volcanic Field.

We simply use autocorrelation to find the Moho reflected phase. This works really well because the direct phase and the Moho phase generate similar scattered waves. When applied to several dozen SoCal EQs, we end up with over 200,000 observations that sample the Moho that are as clear as day!

Fine-scale Southern California Moho structure uncovered with distributed acoustic sensing The Moho reflected phase measured by DAS shows abrupt crustal thickness changes across the Garlock Fault and Coso Volcanic Field.

DAS meets the Moho! New paper in Science Advances w/ Zhongwen Zhan. We developed a method for finding Moho reflections in DAS data. One event can yield 10s of km of fine-scale Moho depth measurements. We applied it to dozens of SoCal events and learned a lot about the Garlock, Coso, and more.

So glad there are people in this world willing to port old compiled codes to python. Often thankless but super impactful work.

First post is a plug for our new paper on the Cascadia SZ led by Hao Guo. We carefully relocated events in the Gorda slab and computed their source parameters. Our results suggest lower effective stress in the slab crust and, by extension, the megathrust! Check it out here: doi.org/10.1785/0220...