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This is a scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher

in Taliata. In addition to giant crustaceans and creepy anglerfish, the deep oceans hide a vital piece of technology.

The cables connecting almost every continent island and archipelago to the internet.

But it seems those undersea cables can be used for more than just sending cute cat memes around the world.

We can do a good job picking up earthquakes using offshore cables.

Jonathan Aho Franklin is an applied geophysicist at Rice University and Lawrence Berkeley National

Lab.

He says that fiber optic cables are like threads of glass, and there are impurities built in.

So when you shoot lasers through the fibers, those impurities back

scatter some of the light right back to the laser source. And we make measurements of the

change in the backscatter light over time, which gives you information on the stretch of the cable at each location.

His team took advantage of a brief maintenance period when a particular cable off the coast of Monterey, California was not being used for communication.

The researchers studied the slight deformations in the cable and were able to sense a small earthquake,

pinpoint unmapped faults in the sea floor, and observed movements in the water column, all of which might be of interest to oceanographers.

Their work is in the journal Science.

Ajo Franklin points out that seismometers are pretty sparse in the world's oceans.

It's a big blank spot.

So these cables could really come in handy.

And unlike for this study, you wouldn't even have to turn off the internet to do it.

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