Fiber optics, which bring the Internet into our homes, will soon become giant ears capable of hearing earth movements, traffic vibrations and ocean waves.
This is the aim of the European Sensei project, presented at the Open Fiber headquarters in Rome, which brings together universities and research centers from different countries in the development of a new generation of distributed sensing technology: tools capable of turning cables into seismic and environmental sensors, without the need to install special devices. “Project Sensei is a project that has been the focus of Open Fiber for eight years – explains Francesco Carpentieri, Responsible Transport Network of Open Fiber – from the beginning we started to imagine what services could be improved, especially for alternative uses of fiber optics. In 2018 we started to imagine the use of fiber for earthquake detection. The project moved from national level to the European community. Project Sensei is a further skylab for further use cases. The testing will involve OpenFiber and GAR networks, with experiments planned between Ascoli Piceno and Teramo, in Campi Flegrei and on the underwater route between Sicily and Malta The aim is to show that even the infrastructure already in use can become a vast sensor network, useful for monitoring earthquakes, landslides, traffic and volcanic activity.
“We are in a new phase with the Sensei project – underlines André Herrero First researcher for INGV, project partner –
where we experiment with new data exploration techniques on fiber to observe phenomena such as tsunamis, ground movements during volcanic eruptions but also to detect earthquakes.”
