Real-time, year-round, cross-Arctic observations integrating three complementary technologies into submarine telecommunication cables
Pirenne, B.; Moran, K.; Howe, B. (2024). Real-time, year-round, cross-Arctic observations integrating three complementary technologies into submarine telecommunication cables, in: OCEANS 2024 - Halifax, 23-26 Sept. 2024. pp. 1-4. https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/oceans55160.2024.10753815
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Document type: Conference paper
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Submarine telecommunication cables, SMART cables, Arctic observing, real-time data collection |
| Authors | | Top |
- Pirenne, B.
- Moran, K.
- Howe, B.
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| Abstract |
On-going geopolitical concerns in Eastern and Northern Europe are raising the awareness of the risks to key infrastructure including intercontinental Internet access. To address such concerns mitigation measures considered include adding redundant access paths to eastern Asia, in addition to those in place today. An approach being considered are Arctic ocean-crossing submarine telecommunication cables. This route shortens the distance (i. e., time) between Europe and Asia and because of the dearth of cables in the Arctic, additional applications such as monitoring the environment along the path are under consideration. This contribution highlights three different environmental sensing technologies that can be associated with a submarine telecommunication cable, and particularly with one crossing the entire Arctic Ocean. The first method consists of sensors in repeaters that are components of the submarine telecommunication cable and placed every 100 km or so. The possible sensors must have long design lives, to provide reliable temperature, pressure and accelerometer data in real time. This is the concept of SMART cables, a concept promoted for over a decade by the ocean research community and now enjoying its first initial implementations with two systems to be deployed in 2026 in the Pacific and Atlantic respectively, following an on-going test in the Mediterranean. SMART cables are now recognized as an emerging network of GOOS, the Global Ocean Observing System. The second method uses recent developments in distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), a method that can precisely pinpoint changes in the strain of an optical fibre by illuminating it with short laser pulses and “interrogating” the reflected signal to measure changes over time and quantify vibrations. This method has been demonstrated to work well over fibre lengths spanning over 100 km. On-going developments by Alcatel Submarine Networks will allow the concept to be generalized on longer cables by providin |
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