In this edition of Futuris Euronews teams up with scientists working off the southern French coast who are ‘fishing’ for the noises created by earthquakes under the sea. <br />To land this elusive catch they they use high-tech kit that is a lot more sophisticated nets. <br /><br />Yann Hello, an electronics engineer with the research body Géoazur, showed us some of the equipment.<br /><br />“This is a hydrophone that helps us listen to earthquakes,” he said indicating an organge buoy-like device.” It can record many other noises under the ocean’s waters: the wind that creates waves, sea mammals, icebergs cracking. But we’re interesting in the noises created by earthquakes”. <br /><br />Once In the water these hi-tech seismologists’ ears are programmed to drift away with deep currents. <br /><br />Romain Verfaillie, a computer scientist with research organisation Osean explained: “We send different programming parameters to the device via radio signals. Thanks to an internal clock and a pressure transducer, we can tell it to go to a certain depth, fix the length of the mission, or decide how long we can keep on recording data”. <br /><br />Each time they record a significant earthquake sound, the hydrophones autonomously rise to the surface and send the data by satellite. At the end of their mission, they can be recovered and re-programmed for a new one. <br /><br />The devices are a masterpiece of electronic and hydraulic research. <br />The main challenge was to distinguish earthquake sounds in an extremely noisy underwater environment. <br /><br />Guust Nolet, a seismic tomographer wth Géoazur, highlighted the difficulty of the task: “The noise in the ocean is so tremendous. There are ships, there are oil companies prospecting for oil, there are whales that sing their own songs… the storms also make a lot of noise. So there are all kind of noise sources down there. <br /><br />“We are looking the this earthquakes in the noise. So a lot of our work has been to develop the intelligence, the artificial intelligence that allows this computer to find out if there is an earthquake or there is just a whale call, for instance”. <br /><br />The technology has many potential uses. It could also be for marine mammal research, or even to locate black boxes after a plane crash at sea. But first and foremost, scientists are working on concrete projects on earthquake research. <br /><br />Yann Hello outlined the possiblities: “600 of these devices scattered around the world’s oceans in the framework of international cooperation would give us a much more accurate imaging of the Earth´s interior than we have now, especially in the southern hemisphere, where there are more oceans and where we lack data”. <br /><br />For more information:<br /><br />==
