Illuminating gaps
Around the world, sensors deployed on satellites, on aircraft, on land, and in water collect data from Earth’s atmosphere, continents, and oceans that enable scientists to observe a whale’s heart rate, calculate forest cover, and measure greenhouse gas emissions, among innumerable other capabilities. Yet many aspects of life on Earth and its systems remain unobserved and poorly understood.
“Biology offers us a series of novels about how the world is working, and yet we can only read about a word per day,” said Jennifer Dionne, professor of materials science and engineering in the Stanford School of Engineering.
Dionne emphasized the need to collect more data with greater speed and efficiency to improve environmental monitoring and human health. Her lab harnesses the properties of light to glean information about biological, chemical, and environmental interactions that are invisible to the naked eye.
Related: Oceans in a new light
Anuscheh Nawaz from the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory noted how some sensors like ocean buoys are often unrecoverable and therefore polluting. She urged attendees to consider biodegradable materials in sensor construction.
Many sensing technologies are also costly and difficult to deploy, operate, and maintain, particularly in remote locations with limited or no infrastructure.
According to Ettore Biondi, an assistant professor of geophysics who presented at the symposium, solutions can be hiding in plain sight. Biondi discussed how leveraging the optical properties of subterranean telecommunication fibers, which transmit data as light signals along their length, can also enable groundwater monitoring.
“We have fibers everywhere, even in the ocean,” Biondi said. “The beauty of this is that by connecting an instrument to existing fibers, you transform it into a system composed of thousands of channels.”
