← Back to Sessions

Submarine Volcano Monitoring With Distributed Acoustic Sensing at Kolumbo, Greece

Description: 

We present the results of an experiment with Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) at Santorini and Kolumbo in Greece and the potential of DAS to augment existing seismic monitoring networks. Kolumbo is an active submarine volcano in the Aegean Sea, and its vicinity to the densely populated island of Santorini emphasizes the need for continuous monitoring.

A 45 km long fiber-optic cable connects the islands of Santorini and Ios, where we acquired data for two months (October – December 2021). Here, we discovered around one thousand events, using an automated earthquake detection algorithm that is based on image processing techniques. DAS reveals an approximate doubling in the number of events detected. Surprisingly, DAS detects many distant events of low magnitudes, while it also misses several larger and nearby events that the existing network does record. Manually picked first arrivals are combined with a travel-time look-up table based on a 1D velocity model to conduct a grid search to locate the events. The ability to locate events depends heavily on the fiber layout and source location, which we verify with synthetic tests. Finally, we compare the performance of DAS to the existing seismic network to locate events, showing that the addition of DAS can refine the event localization.

The results of our experiment highlight the potential of DAS to complement existing monitoring networks to study active submarine volcanoes by locally lowering the detection threshold of a network and decreasing the uncertainty in the event locations.

Session: Fiber-optic Sensing Applications in Seismology [Poster]

Type: Poster

Date: 4/15/2025

Presentation Time: 08:00 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Sara

Student Presenter: Yes

Invited Presentation: 

Poster Number: 56

Authors