The ABYSS project explores the use of offshore telecom fiber cables as underwater seismological observatories. Over two years, it implemented a system for real-time earthquake monitoring in central Chile, using 30,000 sensing points along 450 km of fiber optic cables. This approach has improved sensitivity to offshore seismic activity and supported earthquake monitoring with advanced data streaming technologies.
A central development of the project is an automated seismic monitoring platform for central Chile. This platform processes real-time data to detect, locate, and characterize earthquakes, forming the basis for a future earthquake early warning system. Each day, hundreds of seismic events detected and characterized by the ABYSS network are displayed on the dedicated website. The project has also created specialized workflows for DAS data, powered by the open-source Python library XDAS, which we developed to enable efficient DAS data management.
The project has also tested the potential of distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) technology for early warning systems. DAS offers high spatial resolution offshore, allowing faster detection and magnitude estimation compared to traditional onshore networks. While challenges such as signal saturation for large earthquakes remain, scaling relationships and magnitude estimation methods are being developed to address these limitations. These efforts contribute to improving earthquake monitoring and early warning capabilities.