When lightning strikes the ground, the impact creates small vibrations that propagate through the ground. These “thunderquakes” were believed to be too small to be useful to scientists; if anything, they might even be noise blocking out more tangible signals.
Enter high-quality fiber-optic cables. Researchers at Pennsylvania State University buried telecom cables under their campus, connecting the network to the kinds of acoustic sensors used in seismology. Remarkably, the sensors recovered information on the tiny changes caused by 458 thunderquakes over two years. In a paper published today in Science Advances, the team explained that it…
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