December has been a busy month in the news for FiberSense, especially for FiberSense Vice President of Science & Innovation Nate Lindsey.
The Atlantic highlighted Lindsey in a Nov. 22 story titled “Underground Cables Are Taking the Planet’s Pulse.” The story, which originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, highlights geologists that are using fiber optics to monitor earthquakes, volcanoes and traffic noise. Specifically, Lindsey’s quotes in the article are used to explain how optical fibers for distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) are spread out underground to monitor disturbances in the environment, allowing monitoring of infrastructure assets using existing underground fiber optic networks. The article also outlines how DAS technology is helping to advance science.
“It wiggles as cars go by, as earthquakes happen, as tectonic plates move,” says Lindsey in the article, as he describes how movements along the fiber changes the reflected light signals to detect earthquakes and other disturbances.
The Atlantic article references Lindsey’s work as the co-author of a 2021 article titled Fiber-Optic Seismology in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences. In that article, Lindsey highlights the use of “distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) as an emerging geophysical method that uses an optoelectronic instrument connected to an optical fiber to measure strain along the fiber, effectively repurposing it as a seismic array” to monitor critical assets underground.
As the vice president of Science & Innovation at FiberSense, Lindsey works to develop new insights, methods and products at the interface of optical fiber sensing, data science and physics.
The FiberSense DigitalAsset and DigitalCity sensing portfolio that Lindsey works to continually develop and enhance features protect critical infrastructure through:
- Early warning and detection to not only identify, but minimize potential fiber cable strikes before they happen
- Monitoring the true position and movement of every object in cities in real time
- Providing valuable insights to traffic patterns and flows for city planning
- Detecting physical activity in the vicinity of optical cables carrying fibers connected to the FiberSense system
- Enhanced maintenance with real-time condition monitoring
- “Dial Before You Dig” integration services to deter fiber cable damage
FiberSense services monitor underground assets and have been activated across fiber networks in Europe, the Americas, Australia and across subsea cables linking major continents this year alone.
For more information on FiberSense, visit www.fibersense.com.