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             The Ineffable Importance of Undersea Cable Maintenance

   Adam Engst

   In a sweeping piece for The Verge, [1]Josh Dzieza writes:

     The world's emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers,
     satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are
     about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of
     these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth's oceans, representing
     nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking
     organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but
     for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray
     ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands
     of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world's
     data. If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously
     break, modern civilization would cease to function.

   And break they do, not simultaneously, but at a rate of about one every
   other day, or about 200 times per year. Breaks seldom make the news
   because the Internet routes around damage, although in the case of
   undersea cables, it's probably more accurate to say that the engineers
   managing the system route around the damage, moving traffic to
   undamaged cables.

   Repairing those breaks is the job of the crews of 20-some ships
   stationed around the world. In this beautifully produced and
   illustrated article, Dzieza explains the global system that underlies
   the modern Internet and most other communication channels, interweaving
   it with the story of how the cable maintenance ship Ocean Link repaired
   key cable breaks in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 [2]TÅhoku
   earthquake and tsunami that triggered massive undersea avalanches,
   along with killing nearly 20,000 people in Japan and causing the
   [3]Fukushima nuclear accident.

   And no, satellites aren't much of an alternative'Dzieza says they
   couldn't pick up even half a percent of the traffic carried by undersea
   fiber optic cables.

   [4]Read original article

References

   1. https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships
   2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_and_tsunami
   3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
   4. https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships

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