Long-term marine acoustic and seismic monitoring using distributed acoustic sensing and deep learning

Abstract

The ocean remains one of the least instrumented parts of Earth, and many geophysical, biological, and anthropogenic signals go undetected for lack of instrumentation. Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) can transform submarine fiber-optic cables into dense seafloor sensor arrays, but extracting diverse signals from massive DAS recordings remains challenging. Here we present DASNet, a deep learning framework that detects, classifies, and picks arrival times of diverse marine signals in continuous DAS data. Applied to nearly four years of Seafloor Fiber-Optic Array in Monterey Bay recordings, DASNet identifies more than 620,000 events. These detections reveal local earthquakes; distant earthquake- and volcanic-eruption-generated T-waves from the southwestern Pacific and mid-ocean ridge systems; more than 510,000 blue and fin whale calls with seasonal and interannual variability consistent with hydrophone records; and vessel traffic near the cable. Together, these results show that submarine fiber-optic cables combined with deep learning enable scalable, high-resolution ocean monitoring.