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 ocean monitorin

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