Many earthquakes trigger tsunamis that kill lives, so technology that allows us to identify when one is approaching is a priority for many countries.
Not long ago we talked about technology applied to earthquakes, and today it is the turn of technology applied to tsunami detection.
There are currently 65 active deep-water buoys in the world, buoys that detect waves, but they are very distributed, so they are not useful for many communities that suffer from this natural phenomenon.
Now they want to solve the problem thanks to the Joint Task Force for Submarine Cables for Scientific Monitoring and Reliable Telecommunications (SMART), a United Nations initiative that will install sensors on several commercial submarine telecommunication cables, sensors of pressure, acceleration and temperature that will help identify possible tsunamis.
The objective is to place the sensors next to the signal repeaters of the fiber optic cables, repeaters that are every 50 km, approximately. Once installed, we will be able to collect information on the seabed and transmit data on possible tsunamis.
It has taken a long time, many years, to convince the underwater telecommunications industry to integrate scientific sensors for this purpose, but it seems that the go-ahead has already been fired.
By adding external sensors to the repeaters, the design of the system changes, so it is not a small investment. To prove that it can be done, a startup called Subsea Data Systems, with funding from the US National Science Foundation, built a prototype repeater that showed it could be done.
The next step is to put three test repeaters off the coast of Sicily. Alcatel announced that it will have this technology ready in 2025, and in Portugal they will do so with a cable connecting the islands of Madeira and the Azores.
There are proposals to put a cable between Vanuatu and New Caledonia, and others in New Zealand, the Mediterranean, Scandinavia and even Antarctica.
Cables with sensors that save lives, an idea that gives goosebumps.
