The Nature group, publisher of some of the most prestigious journals in the international scientific community, has published the results of the Meglio project (Measuring Earthquakes signals Gathered with LaserInterferometry on Optic Fibers), the collaboration set up by Open Fiber, the National Institute of Metrological Research (Inrim) and the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (Ingv) to use optical fiber as a sensor for the detection of seismic waves.
In our country, seismicity is constantly monitored thanks to a dense network of sensors, managed and periodically updated by Ingv. A capillary fiber network, such as the Ftth (Fiber To The Home) network created by Open Fiber, which extends from our homes to the most remote ocean floors, is an invaluable tool for probing the territory, supporting and complementing conventional sensors.
This is confirmed by the results obtained by Meglio, a project started in 2020, which saw the creation of a seismic observatory that uses a pair of Open Fiber optical fibers between Ascoli Piceno and Teramo as distributed sensors.
A laser signal, launched into these fibers without interfering with normal data traffic, allows the microscopic elongations of the fibers caused by seismic vibrations to be measured through a particular interferometric technique developed by Inrim.
During a two-year experiment, several dozen seismic events were recorded, from the most disastrous, such as the earthquake that occurred in Turkey in February 2023, to those that were almost imperceptible (with a magnitude less than 2). An in-depth analysis of the recordings, led by the INGV, confirmed the validity of the recorded data and the potential of this technique as a permanent and capillary monitoring tool.