Julien Pacaud
Beneath the winding streets of Istanbul, Turkey, a fibre-optic cable pulses with laser light. Until recently, this stretch of the information superhighway has lain dormant and dark, but a group of researchers now huddles around to watch a computer screen fill with shimmering lines of data as the light flashes underground. The lines represent subtle underground vibrations from an earthquake, detected along the fibre in a way that has only recently become possible – part of a decades-long quest to peel back the surface of Earth and look inside.
Much of the internet, phone systems, television and other high-speed communications relies…
