The fight to save thousands of lives with sea-floor sensors

Jerry Paros is worried about the geological time bomb ticking away just off the coast near his home in Washington state. But unlike the millions of people who fear the earthquake and tsunami that will one day rock that region, Paros is doing something about it. His company made millions of dollars building exquisitely precise quartz sensors for oil, gas and other industry applications. Now he wants to use them to save the world from natural disasters.

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Geophysicists have long struggled to get a handle on the behaviour of offshore faults, but sensors such as the one created by Paros are giving them their first opportunity to spy on geodetic movements of the 70% of Earth's crust that is covered by water, making it inaccessible to standard tools. These networks could reveal which parts of undersea faults are slipping harmlessly and which parts might be storing energy for the next big quake.

“It will help us answer the big question of where are those zones,” says Emily Roland, an oceanographer at the University of Washington in Seattle, who works with Paros. “It's the thing that we've been missing.”