SAN JUAN ISLAND, Wash. — As dawn broke over San Juan Island, a team of scientists stood on the deck of a barge and unspooled over a mile of fiber-optic cable into the frigid waters of the Salish Sea. Working by headlamp, they fed the line from the rocky shore down to the seafloor — home to the region's orcas.

What You Need To Know • Scientists from the University of Washington recently deployed a little over 1 mile of fiber-optic cable in the Salish Sea to test whether internet cables can monitor endangered orcas • The technology is called Distributed Acoustic Sensing • It transforms cables into continuous underwater microphones that can pinpoint whale locations and track their movements • If successful, the world's 870,000 miles of existing undersea cables could become a vast oce

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