Projects – Full Ocean Fibre

The deep ocean is one of the least observed environments on Earth with observations typically only in small areas or for short periods of time.

We could, as a result, be missing early warning signals of potentially vital tipping points – critical thresholds in the Earth’s system. 
Developments in fibre-optic technology have shown it is possible to use the optical fibres at the core of conventional telecommunications cables as distributed arrays of sensors to monitor the environment around them. This includes the ocean.

Various fibre-optic sensing methods exist, including an increasingly popular approach called Distributed Optical Fibre Sensing (DOFS).
DOFS measures changes in backscattered light along an optical fibre to convert a telecommunications cable into a dense array of spatially distributed strain sensors, recording at up to 1 m intervals along a cable.

The Full Ocean Fibre team has been funded as a part of the ARIA Forecasting Tipping Points programme to develop these DOFS techniques to make ocean measurements in this under observed environment in two ways: 
i) Using ocean soundscape techniques to make novel depth-resolved observations along 100 km of subsea cable crossing from Shetland to the Faroe Islands, intersecting key boundary currents in the subpolar North Atlantic.
ii) Fingerprinting oceanographic processes in long-range (1,000s km) spatially-distributed seafloor sensing along up to 6,000 km of telecommunications cables that cross the Norwegian, Irminger and Labrador Seas, intersecting the subpolar gyre.