16 Dec 2025

Fiber-Optic Distributed Acoustic Sensing for Nondestructive Monitoring of Permafrost

Fiber-optic distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) has gained traction in recent years as a geophysical monitoring tool. Advancements in commercially available DAS have allowed for sub-10 m data resolution and high sampling rates (over 10 kHz), leading to the use of DAS for infrastructure change detection and localization monitoring. Using this technology, a team from the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center–Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (ERDC-CRREL) built a field campaign around monitoring changes in permafrost using DAS via a dispersion analysis of surface wave propagation. In May 2024, active seismic testing was performed on a rapidly deployed, surface-laid, nondestructive DAS array above CRREL’s permafrost tunnel. Active source testing was repeated in September 2024 to collect data that may indicate changes in the seismic response due to permafrost changes. DAS response data was also collected from an unmanned aerial system (UAS) to evaluate for potential use in standoff assessment of permafrost changes. The field campaign results indicate that nondestructive DAS arrays are likely useful in detecting and localizing changes in near-surface properties of the permafrost.