Distributed Acoustic Sensing in Antarctica: What we can learn for studying microseismicity elsewhere

Here, we present the first results of DAS deployed in Antarctica to interrogate icequake microseismicity. Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) can provide much higher density spatial sampling of an earthquake’s seismic wavefield than conventional seismometer networks, and is therefore promising for microseismicity studies generally. We first present a methodology for microseismic event detection and location using DAS. We then demonstrate the potential of DAS for discriminating source mechanisms and anisotropic path effects. To our knowledge, this is the first full waveform source mechanism inversion of a microseismic source using DAS. We also investigate the potential of DAS for ambient noise studies. In each case, we compare the performance of DAS to conventional geophones. Our results have implications for future microseismicity studies, highlighting both the promise and limitations of DAS for such applications.