Earthquake Detection Using Fiber Optic Distributed Acoustic Sensing

In the last two decades, fiber optic distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) has gained popularity within many fields including seismic analysis and intrusion detection applications. In this paper, we propose a fiber optic DAS scheme for earthquake sensing and data analysis purposes. Using our modified DAS setup (previously used for intrusion detection), we successfully recorded many earthquakes with epicentral distances ranging from 12 to 1319 km and magnitudes from 1.1 to 6.9, within the time period of August, 2019 - August, 2021. The utilized communication fiber optic cables lie approximately 50 km southeast of Istanbul, and has a length of 4 and 25 km. In this paper we are presenting our experimental DAS system in detail and our contributions to seismic sensing using fiber DAS.