Natural disasters like floods or earthquakes catch completely off guard and come without any serious prior warning as such. At times one often wonders, is it possible to detect earthquakes? Well, that’s exactly what

Google recently conducted an experiment using its subsea fiber optic cables, which showed that it could be useful for earthquake and tsunami warning systems.

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Valey Kamalov and Mattia Cantono from Google Global Networking posted a blog detailing how Google plans to detect earthquakes. “Last October, an idea came to us: we could detect earthquakes based on spectral signatures—performing a spectral analysis of Stokes parameters to look at frequencies that are typical of earthquakes,” they said in the blog post.

Google believes that its approach relies on technology that is widespread on today’s fiber optic networks. Millions of kilometers of fibre optic networks already span the globe, operated by governments, telecommunications providers, and technology companies, including Google. “By collaborating with the global subsea cable community, we may be able to improve the world’s ability to detect and research seismic activity around the world,” Google said in the blog post.