Singapore researchers find earthquakes and old optics can both bend the region's tech future

Two papers from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore landed within two hours of each other on 13 July 2026, and taken together they sketch a wider question for the city-state and its neighbours: how much of the physical and computational scaffolding the region relies on was built on assumptions that no longer hold.

The first study, published in the afternoon, argues that the standard projections of relative sea-level rise across Southeast Asia systematically underestimate the contribution of major earthquakes, because the region's tectonic history has been treated as a slow-burn problem when in places it is a punctuated one. The second, a photonics paper out of the same university, shows that an optical phenomenon first described in the 1820s can be harnessed to build exotic light structures called optical skyrmions, the kind of stable, topologically protected beams that computing and imaging researchers have spent the past decade trying to manufacture at scale. Two very different fields, one common authorship base, one common suggestion that the conventional framing deserves a second look.

What the earthquake study actually changes

The standard practice, as the NTU-led team describes it, treats vertical land motion across Southeast Asia as a slow and broadly uniform signal, dominated by glacio-isostatic adjustment, sediment compaction and gradual tectonics. Earthquakes get folded in as a correction factor rather than a primary variable, on the grounds that recurrence intervals in this part of the world are long and the geodetic record is short.

The team's argument is that for several coastal lowlands in the region the post-seismic deformation signal is large enough, and lasts long enough, to alter the trajectory of relative sea-level change over multi-decadal horizons. Their modelling implies that planners working from the conventional curves may be under-counting the inundation risk for low-lying population centres on the Sunda Shelf and along parts of the Philippine and Indonesian arcs, where a single magnitude-8 class event can shift land elevation by tens of centimetres in seconds and continue deforming the surrounding crust for years afterwards.

In practical terms, that means a 2050 or 2100 inundation map for parts of Sumatra, Java, the southern Philippines or the Mekong delta built only on the smooth background signal will be wrong in the direction that planners care about most: too low. The NTU group's preferred framing is not alarmist. They argue for embedding realistic earthquake-deformation scenarios into the regional sea-level stack, the same way storm-surge models are now run as ensembles rather than single deterministic curves.

What the optical-skyrmion paper actually changes

The second study is on its surface the more counter-intuitive. Optical skyrmions are arrangements of light whose internal polarisation texture is topologically protected: the structure cannot be unwound into a simple polarised beam without tearing, which makes them unusually robust against perturbations that scramble ordinary laser modes. They have been demonstrated in liquid-crystal devices, in plasmonic nanostructures and in fibre, but each route has involved elaborate, lithography-grade fabrication.

The NTU team reports a way to generate them using nothing more than a laser, a few polarising optics and a phenomenon first catalogued in the 1820s by William Nicol, whose eponymous prism was the standard way of producing polarised light in 19th-century laboratories. The point of reaching for such an old trick is not nostalgia. It is that a fabrication route which relies on a well-understood polarisation effect rather than bespoke metasurfaces can, in principle, be replicated in any photonics lab with a Nicol prism or a modern polarising equivalent.

For the computing community the implication is straightforward. Several of the proposals for next-generation optical and neuromorphic processors treat stable, topologically protected light modes as a prerequisite, on the grounds that ordinary beams scatter, diffract and lose coherence when squeezed into the small geometries those devices require. A cheap, reproducible skyrmion source lowers the entry barrier for experimental groups that do not have a nanofabrication line. The authors are careful not to over-claim; the paper is a laboratory demonstration, not a chip. But the trajectory it points to is the kind of unfussy, kit-level innovation that historically has a habit of being absorbed into industrial photonics faster than the more spectacular metasurface demonstrations.

Why the same university, the same week

There is no claim of cross-pollination in either paper. They are independent groups with different funding lines, different co-author networks and different journals. But the fact that both findings are coming out of NTU in the same fortnight tells its own story about how a city-state without commodity natural resources has chosen to compete. Singapore's bet, now three decades old, is that the binding constraint on a small economy is not land or minerals but the rate at which it can turn graduate-level research into a productive asset. Both of these papers are early-stage examples of that bet: one re-examines a physical assumption that has quietly shaped regional infrastructure budgets, the other rediscovers a tool that the 19th century left in the drawer.

What to watch next

The earthquake paper needs to be stress-tested against independent geodetic records, in particular the GNSS station network run across Indonesia and the Philippines, before planners should treat its revised curves as more than an indicative update. The optical-skyrmion result needs to be replicated outside NTU and, ideally, demonstrated in a device geometry rather than a free-space bench. Neither is a reason for scepticism so much as the normal pace of physics and earth science. What both papers do, in their different idioms, is remind the reader that the inputs to a projection are sometimes older and simpler than the projection itself.

Desk note: Monexus treats these two NTU Singapore findings as a paired signal, not as a story about a single institution. The wire lead was two separate releases, twelve hours apart; we ran them together because the underlying pattern, re-examining long-held inputs to regional projection and photonics, is what the day actually contained.