@depth · Projects

DETEKT

Hearing sperm whales through a fiber on the seafloor.
About the project

What is DETEKT?

DETEKT asks a deceptively simple question: can you hear a sperm whale through a fiber-optic cable lying on the seafloor? Funded under Açores 2030 (ref. ACORES2030-FEDER-01912600), it pairs the Institute of Marine Research (IMAR) and the Azores Whale Lab with @depth to test whether Distributed Acoustic Sensing — DAS — can pick a sperm whale's clicks out of the ordinary hum of a submarine telecom cable.

If it works, a single strand of fiber already on the ocean floor becomes a listening array kilometers long: no new hardware in the water, no batteries to recover, just light moving through a cable that is there anyway.

The approach

Listening on the cable

A DAS interrogator monitors a submarine cable between the Azores islands of Faial and São Jorge for about two months, turning the fiber into a dense line of acoustic sensors.

Known sounds, known distances

Controlled playbacks from an underwater loudspeaker reproduce sperm whale clicks at set source levels and distances, calibrating what the fiber can actually resolve.

Ground truth from the animals

Non-invasive multi-sensor tags placed on whales near the cable record real animals, so the cable's sensitivity can be checked against genuine events.

Our part

Where @depth comes in

DAS is a firehose. Sampling strain continuously along a cable generates enormous volumes of data, and storing, moving, and making that data workable is @depth's part of the project — the same efficient, sustainable handling of heavy data that the rest of what we do is built around.

For @depth, DETEKT is a storage problem worth solving well. The analysis is planned around roughly 35 TB of data, and we built the storage to hold it — sized, structured, and ready before the first measurement is recorded. The fieldwork hasn't started yet; as the project moves from preparation into the water, we'll expand this account of what we're contributing and what we're learning.

~35 TB

of data planned for analysis

The partners

Azores Whale Lab IMAR / OKEANOS-UAç

A long track record in sperm whale ecology and bioacoustics, leading the fieldwork, data processing, and scientific side of the project.

Visit the lab
@depth Data & compute

Storage and data handling for the project, sized for the volumes DAS produces and built for efficiency from the ground up.

About @depth
K. Lisa Yang Center Cornell University

The Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, whose team has pioneered the use of DAS for monitoring cetaceans.

Visit the center

Funding

DETEKT (ACORES2030-FEDER-01912600) is funded by the PO Açores 2030 programme — Government of the Azores, Portugal 2030, and the European Union.

Deteção de cliques de cachalotes à velocidade da luz – DETEKT

Açores 2030, Governo dos Açores, Portugal 2030, Cofinanciado pela União Europeia, Governo dos Açores - Vice-Presidência do Governo
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