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This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Christopher Intagliata.

这里是科学美国人——60秒科学系列，我是克里斯托弗·因塔格里塔。

In addition to giant crustaceans¹ 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 cat memes around the world.

除了巨型甲壳纲动物和令人毛骨悚然的安康鱼外，深海还隐藏着一项至关重要的技术产品：几乎将所有大陆、岛屿和群岛与互联网连在一起的电缆。但是这些海底电缆的用途似乎不仅仅是将可爱的猫咪表情包发送到世界各地。

"We can do a good job picking up earthquakes using offshore² cables."

“我们可以利用海上电缆准确地探测地震。”

Jonathan Ajo-Franklin is an applied³ geophysicist at Rice University and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He says that fiber-optic cables are like threads of glass—and there are impurities⁴ built in. So when you shoot lasers through the fibers⁵, those impurities backscatter some of the light right back to the laser source.

莱斯大学和劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室的应用地球物理学家乔纳森·阿霍-富兰克林说到。他说光纤电缆就像玻璃纤维一样，里面有杂质。因此当你通过光纤发送激光时，这些杂质会将一部分光反射回激光源。

"And we make measurements of the change in the backscattered light over time, which gives you information on the stretch of the cable at each location."

“我们测量了后向散射光随时间的变化，这种光提供了各个位置电缆段的信息。”

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 deformations⁶ in the cable and were able to sense a small earthquake, pinpoint⁷ unmapped faults in the seafloor and observe movements in the water column—all of which might be of interest to oceanographers.

他的团队利用电缆短暂维护期来进行研究，当时加利福尼亚州蒙特利海岸的一条特殊电缆未用于通讯。研究人员研究了电缆轻微变形情况，并能够检测到小地震、精确定位海床上未标明的错误以及观察到水柱的移动，所有这些都可能引起海洋学家的兴趣。

Their work is in the journal Science.

他们的研究发表在《科学》期刊上。

Ajo-Franklin points out that seismometers are pretty sparse⁸ in the world's oceans:

阿霍-富兰克林指出，地震仪在世界海洋中相当稀少：

"It's a big blank spot."

“这是个巨大的空白。”

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.

因此这些电缆迟早会派上用场。与此项研究不同的是，人们甚至不必关闭互联网来检测地震。

"We're looking at ways of potentially using just a small section of the spectrum⁹, so you can communicate at the same time you can do sensing on these kinds of cables."

“我们正在寻找可能只使用一小截电缆的潜在方法，这样就可以用这种电缆检测地震的同时保持通讯。”

这可能将地球更多的低沉隆隆声连接到网络上。

谢谢大家收听科学美国人——60秒科学。我是克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔。

Which might bring more of the Earth's deep rumblings online.

Thanks for listening for Scientific American's 60-second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.