Scientists turned those undersea internet cables into a massive microphone to listen to 400,000 whale calls.
arXiv · March 17, 2026 · 2603.14844
The Takeaway
Researchers used a technique called Distributed Acoustic Sensing to repurpose thousands of miles of glass fiber already lying on the ocean floor as high-sensitivity sensors. This allowed them to monitor earthquakes and track the individual migration patterns of blue and fin whales across the Pacific without installing any new hardware.
From the abstract
Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) enables high-resolution and long-duration monitoring of marine acoustic and seismic activity by turning existing fiber-optic cables into dense sensor arrays. However, extracting diverse signals from continuous DAS data remains challenging due to the massive data volumes and signal complexity. Here, we present DASNet, a deep learning framework for automated detection, classification, and arrival-time picking of diverse marine signals in DAS data. The model is tr