What is it about?
Cities need detailed and continuous monitoring of what’s happening underground—for example, to manage groundwater, check for earthquake risks, and maintain infrastructure. Traditional methods using seismic sensors are often too expensive and hard to install densely in urban areas. This study shows how Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) can help. DAS turns existing fiber-optic cables, like those used for interne, into dense networks of seismic sensors. Using data from an experiment at Stanford, we show that: 1. Daily underground imaging is possible using signals from passing vehicles. 2. Ambient noise, like city hums, can improve data quality but needs to be carefully selected because it changes day to day. 3. Earthquakes recorded on these cables can also help map hidden faults beneath cities. This approach opens up a way to monitor city subsurfaces continuously and in high detail, using infrastructure that's already in place.
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Why is it important?
This work offers a new, practical way to monitor the ground beneath cities in high resolution and in real time, using infrastructure that already exists—telecom fiber-optic cables.
Perspectives
This study demonstrates the potential of urban Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) for continuous, high-resolution imaging and monitoring of the shallow subsurface, leveraging existing fiber-optic infrastructure. The implications span a wide range of disciplines, from groundwater management and infrastructure resilience to seismic hazard assessment, highlighting DAS as a scalable, cost-effective solution for modern cities facing growing environmental and geotechnical challenges. As urban DAS deployments expand globally, they promise to become integral components of smart, resilient cities.
Haipeng Li
Stanford University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Near-surface imaging and monitoring enabled by urban distributed acoustic sensing seismic arrays, The Leading Edge, August 2025, Society of Exploration Geophysicists,
DOI: 10.1190/tle44080588.1.
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