Earthquakes represent one of the greatest natural disaster risks facing humanity. According to plate tectonics theory, the earth’s lithosphere is divided into plates by seismic zones that move relative to each other. The majority of earthquakes occur along these plates’ boundaries, with seismogenic faults being the geological origins of destructive earthquakes [
1]. However, predicting earthquakes is a common scientific challenge for researchers globally. Much of this difficulty stems from the lack of reliable precursory indicators that meet the sufficient and necessary conditions of their occurrence, which is often considered the primary cause of failure in earthquake prediction efforts in earth science research. Monitoring these seismic events is an essential part in trying to predict them, and that employs range of different methods. For instance, absolute measurement of geostress to assess the stress characteristics of significant faults [
2], as seen in SAFOD project [
3]. Li Siguang, a pioneer of earthquake prediction in China, pointed out that an earthquake is a process of accumulation of stress on seismogenic faults. Real time monitoring of geostress using tools like stress gauges can be leveraged to track changes in fault lines, providing insights into the release of seismic energy [
4]. Crustal strain monitoring through strain gauges and GPS technology have been developed for seismic research and prediction as well [
5,
6]. Additionally, Infrared monitoring method, as the infra-sound signal in the far field is found to be strong within two to eleven days before an earthquake with a magnitude of M7.0 or higher struck, and its spectral characteristics are apparently different from other natural events [
7]. Unfortunately, in 1988, seismologists in United States deployed a dense network of monitoring stations focused mainly on "Surface Strain Monitoring", in addition to tracking geo-magnetic, geo-electric, ground-water level, and hydro-chemistry data, to predict an M6 earthquake occurring in the Park-field near the San Andreas fault. Yet, the anticipated earthquake didn’t occur until 2004, 16 years later than expected, and the monitoring equipment failed to pick up any anomalies or precursors [
8]. Similarly, in 1995, an M7 earthquake struck in Hanshin, Japan, killing more than 6500 people, where the high density GPS network in place did not capture warning signals. Consequently, the scientific community become increasingly skeptical about earthquake prediction. In March 1997, Robert J. Geller published a paper titled, "Earthquakes cannot be predicted" in Science magazine, which reflected the prevailing opinion on earthquake prediction in the work [
9]. Therefore, it is crucial to address this challenge differently by adopting novel methods for widely distributed early detection systems capable of rapidly identifying the event to activate different mitigation strategies and minimize humanitarian and economic impact. According to the International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth’s Interior (IASPEI), one of the main potential earthquake precursors is changes in strain rates which are the rates at which the Earth’s crust stretches or compresses [
10]. This is because such changes are indicative of stress accumulation in the Earth’s crust, potentially pointing towards upcoming seismic event. Consequently, as optical fiber cables are buried underground, they too experience stretching or compression in response to the strain rate change caused by seismic waves. The mechanical and optical properties of an optical fiber, as well as the physical properties of the light wave propagating inside it, change due to applied mechanical stresses and external disturbances. This trend opens the perspective of using the optical networks as a wide distributed network of sensors for environmental sensing, such as earthquake detection or anthropic activities monitoring [
11,
12]. Essentially, there are two types of seismic waves, body waves (Primary, P waves and Secondary, S waves) that propagate through the earth’s interior, and Surface waves that propagate along the earth’s surface. Surface waves carry the greatest amount of energy and are usually the primary cause of destruction [
13]. Detecting P waves that precede earthquake’s destructive waves allows swift initiation of emergency plans. Therefore, we have witnessed recently the rise of distributed fiber optic sensors that offer the possibility of measuring a slow varying environmental variable at any location along the fiber length within a given sharp spatial resolution. This approach has been developed in last decade to monitor dynamic strain variations induced by external perturbations using optical fibers. Distributed optical fiber sensors utilize the natural scattering processes arising in optical fibers, including Brillouin, Raman, and Rayleigh scattering. Rayleigh scattering combined with Optical Time-Domain Reflectometry (OTDR) or Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry (OFDR) has allowed the development of Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) [
14,
15]. DAS employs optoelectronic interrogator, which send short light pulses into the fiber cable and then measure the optical perturbations in the light that scatters back, thereby deriving strain-rate signals proportional to the amount of physical stress impacting the fiber. These systems require dedicated "dark" fibers (i.e., optical fibers used solely for sensing without any communication channels) to operate [
16,
17,
18]. Thus, limiting the overall data carrying capacity in the network. Moreover, these sensing techniques are incompatible with inline optical amplifiers that are commonly found along optical fibers’ path, and this is because the optical isolators inside the amplifiers block the backscattered DAS signals. Although these amplifications could be removed along dark fibers, which would lead to rampant signal attenuation. It is worth mentioning as well, that the usable range of this technology is less than 100 km and requires powerful computational, storage, and processing capabilities that are generally only available in high-cost systems [
19,
20]. Frequency metrology interferometric techniques came to overcome DAS usable range limitations. These techniques can measure femtoseconds delay experienced by the light of an ultrastable low phase Fabry-Pérot laser cavities traveling in the fiber at micrometer scale over several thousands of kilometers for fiber length [
21], but still interferometric techniques considered to be using dedicated and expensive hardware. In this manuscript, we present a novel technique that employs light polarization sensing. Unlike DAS and interferometric systems, State-of-Polarization (SOP) sensing based on machine learning, analyze the integrated polarization alterations of the modulated light traveling through traffic-carrying optical fibers [
22]. This approach aimed to leverage the existing terrestrial optical network as a whole smart sensing grid to produce early anomaly warnings by identifying the arrival of earthquake’s P waves without adding expensive equipment to the network, ensuring long-range measurements, and without requiring dedicated dark fibers. Thanks to the centralized design of our smart sensing grid optical network approach, which we detail in this work.