Many of the world’s largest and most devastating earthquakes strike beneath the ocean, where the lack of sensors makes quick warnings difficult. Most monitoring stations are on land.

“If we have a big earthquake under the water, like that Kamchatka earthquake [this summer], our sensors that tell us an earthquake just happened are really quite far away,” said Emily Brodsky , a geophysicist at UC Santa Cruz. “And so we’re sort of looking through this very fuzzy pair of glasses at the earthquake and making our best guess on what it’s gonna mean in terms of tsunamis or anything else.”

New research published Thursday suggests fiber optic cables on the ocean floor could serve as earthquake sensors, Brodsky said. She co-authored a commentary accompanying the paper.

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