Sandia National Laboratories Partners with Quintillion to Conduct First of Its Kind Arctic Research News provided by Share this article Share this article ANCHORAGE, Alaska, April 8, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Warming at roughly double the rate as the rest of the world, the Arctic is disproportionately affected by climate change, yet the region remains one of the least understood. Sandia National Laboratories scientists are working to gain understanding of the area by capturing and analyzing data pulled from the depths of the Arctic Ocean. In early February, a team of Sandia scientists, led by geophysicist Rob Abbott, connected a distributed acoustic sensing interrogator system to Quintillion's existing fiber optic cable network along the seafloor of Oliktok Point. This is the first time distributed acoustic sensing has been used to capture data on the seafloor under sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. The system captured and recorded cable vibrations 24 hours a day for a full week to identify the natural and human activity taking place within the data-starved ocean.