I was honoured to be invited as a keynote speaker at the SUBMERSE Project Final Event — The Future of Subsea Fibre Optic Sensing — held at the University of Copenhagen from 15 to 17 April 2026.
My talk, titled “Wired for wonder and warning: Utilising submarine cables for exploration and environmental resilience” was aimed at giving an overview of progress made on repurposing submarine telecommunication cables into large-scale environmental sensors for various applications from geophysics to ocean science.
Beyond my own contribution, attending the event was a great opportunity to take stock of everything colleagues in Europe have achieved over the past three years. Colleagues from 25 partner institutions shared results from fibre-sensing deployments in Norway, Portugal, Greece, and Italy, and the discussions ranged from the physics of deep-sea DAS to the governance frameworks needed to share data at scale. It was genuinely exciting to see so many groups converging on common challenges: data sharing protocols, interoperability between networks, and the path toward making fibre-sensing technology both widespread and genuinely useful for society.
The conversations around data exchange, open infrastructure, and what a coordinated European fibre-sensing capability could look like felt like real first steps toward something lasting. There is still much to build — but the foundations are being laid.
Many thanks to the SUBMERSE Consortium and to GÉANT for organising this event.
