Avalanches and other hazardous mass movements pose a danger to the population and critical infrastructure in alpine areas. Hence, understanding and continuously monitoring mass movements is crucial to mitigate their risk. We propose to use Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) to measure strain rate along a fiber-optic cable to characterize ground deformation induced by avalanches. We recorded 12 snow avalanches of various dimensions at the Vallée de la Sionne test site in Switzerland, utilizing existing fiber-optic infrastructure and a DAS interrogation unit during the winter 2020/2021. By training a Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Model, we automatically characterize and classify avalanche-induced ground deformations using physical properties extracted from the frequency-wavenumber and frequency-velocity domain of the DAS recordings. The resulting model can estimate the probability of avalanches in the DAS data and is able to differentiate between the avalanche-generated seismic near-field, the seismo-acoustic far-field and the mass movement propagating on top of the fiber. By analyzing the mass-movement propagation signals, we are able to identify group velocity packages within an avalanche that propagate faster than the phase velocity of the avalanche front, indicating complex internal structures. Importantly, we show that the seismo-acoustic far-field can be detected before the avalanche reaches the fiber-optic array, highlighting DAS as a potential research and early warning tool for hazardous mass movements.

InSight’s seismometer package SEIS was placed on the surface of Mars at about 1.2 m distance from the thermal properties instrument HP3 that includes a self-hammering probe. Recording the hammering noise with SEIS provided a unique opportunity to estimate the seismic wave velocities of the shallow regolith at the landing site. However, the value of studying the seismic signals of the hammering was only realised after critical hardware decisions were already taken. Furthermore, the design and nominal operation of both SEIS and HP3 are non-ideal for such high-resolution seismic measurements. Therefore, a series of adaptations had to be implemented to operate the self-hammering probe as a controlled seismic source and SEIS as a high-frequency seismic receiver including the design of a high-precision timing and an innovative high-frequency sampling workflow. By interpreting the first-arriving seismic waves as a P-wave and identifying first-arriving S-waves by polarisation analysis, we determined effective P- and S-wave velocities of vP = 119+45-21 m/s and vS = 63+11-7 m/s, respectively, from around 2,000 hammer stroke recordings. These velocities likely represent bulk estimates for the uppermost several 10’s of cm of regolith. An analysis of the P-wave incidence angles provided an independent vP/vS ratio estimate of 1.84+0.89-0.35 that compares well with the traveltime based estimate of 1.86+0.42-0.25. The low seismic velocities are consistent with those observed for low-density unconsolidated sands and are in agreement with estimates obtained by other methods.