Overview

• Researchers from the University of Montreal, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and UC Berkeley introduced DASFormer in a study published July 15, 2025 in Visual Intelligence.
• Distributed Acoustic Sensing repurposes existing fiber-optic cables into meter-scale seismic arrays, producing vast continuous data that has been difficult to label and analyze.
• DASFormer pretrains on unlabeled recordings to learn predictable background patterns, so earthquake signals appear as sharp deviations the system can detect automatically.
• USGS geophysicist Mark Petersen called the approach a fundamental advance for public safety, with potential value for architects, engineers and policy makers.
• The system is not yet an operational early-warning tool and requires field-scale validation, integration with alert networks and performance testing, a need underscored by recent significant seismic events such as the September 13 M7.4 in Kamchatka.