Every time there’s an online outage or streaming service starts to buffer, there’s an impulse to blame a hacker...or “the cloud.” After all, web traffic is handled by satellites, right? Wrong.
Undersea cables carry between 95-99 percent of global internet traffic, underpinning almost every aspect of our digital lives, from financial trading to social media, says Dr. Mike Clare, a researcher at the National Oceanography Centre in the UK, who studies natural hazards in the ocean environment, such as underwater earthquakes, landslides, and volcanoes. In his work, he tries to understand not only how those events could damage or impact cables but also the reverse—how cables impact and interact with the marine environment around them.
If you were able to see subsea cables thousands of feet below the surface, they would look like a garden hose lying on the ocean floor. Inside are glass fibers the width of a human hair carrying our content. Lane Burdette, a researcher at TeleGeography, a company that builds and maintain massive data sets used to monitor, forecast, and map the telecommunications industry, says that as of September 2024, there are more than 600 active and planned submarine cables.
Dr. Clare explains to me—in a conversation online and by way of subsea cable from his office in the UK to mine in Denver, Colorado—that of the about 1.6 million kilometers of fiber optic cable crisscrossing the oceans, there are only around one to two hundred instances of damage every year. He says 70 percent of those instances are due to accidental human activities—trawling by fishing boats or dropped anchors that snag a cable.
War can be a factor, too. Last February, submarine cables were severed in the Red Sea, after the Houthi-controlled Yemeni government began firing missiles and armed drones at ships. One vessel, the Rubymar, was crippled, forcing the crew to drop anchor and abandon the ship, which snagged and broke cables as it drifted.
Natural hazards such as earthquakes, landslides, and underwater volcanoes, such as the eruption in 2022 that cut off the internet to the island nation of Tonga in the South Pacific, account for the rest of cable faults. Clare says that three-quarters of the world's volcanoes lie under the sea, but not many have been mapped, so the precise threat is unknown.
One threat to undersea cables that is coming into focus is climate change. Extreme storms with heavy rain send plumes of sediment from coastlines into the ocean where they can snap any cables in their path. In some cases, storms might not impact a cable directly but might affect good weather windows that crews would need to do repairs and maintenance.
What About the SHARKS??
As public awareness of subsea cables has increased, so too have concerns over risks to the infrastructure we’ve become reliant on. “Fifteen years ago, nobody knew that the cloud is under the sea, right? Everyone assumed it's in satellites," Clare says. He’s disappointed that media are focused on cable faults, despite statistics per kilometer length of cables showing breaks are decreasing every year. “It’s frustrating from a personal perspective because the things that we could be doing stuff about are the natural hazards, right? We could be paying more attention to those things where actually research and investment would be useful.”
So, in other words, stop talking about the sharks. Stop with the click-bait headlines asking if sharks are “the apocalypse for the internet” (followed by a next line that says “no.”) As a geologist, Clare wants people to get more excited by natural hazards. “That's where the interesting stuff lies.”
Putting the shark risk in perspective, "the animals are curious," Clare says, and they did nibble on cables decades ago, but the industry responded by protecting them with Kevlar, a strong and lightweight synthetic fiber, and for the past 30 years attacks are no longer an issue. For the most part, undersea cables have quietly hummed along since the first ones were laid in the 1800s to transmit telegraph messages between Europe and North America.
Recently, there have been concerns raised by western governments that Russia or other bad actors might want to sever cables to interrupt communications. Clare responds that, “as scientists, we do things with numbers and facts and statistics. If we look statistically at the number of faults that are attributable to intentional human activity, it's far less than one percent of everything that's happened to date. I think there would be easier ways to disrupt the network than to have to go all the way into thousands of meters of water depth and go and find cables.” Clare adds that most companies follow a “safety in numbers” approach, spreading their activity over multiple cables. Still, many governments are increasingly focusing their attention on subsea cables as critical infrastructure for national security—perhaps ruling out shark attacks—but not saboteurs. 💧
Help Wanted: Internet Plumbers
The vast majority of our online lives—sending emails, streaming movies, and facilitating business in general—is transmitted by cables crisscrossing the world’s oceans. Given this vital infrastructure, it might be surprising to learn that the number of people who work in the subsea cable industry is remarkably small. Unfortunately, many of those folks are aging out—all while the number of subsea cables is expected to grow.
“I think the industry is a little worried,” says Professor Nicole Starosielski, who is at the University of California, Berkeley, where she conducts research and lectures about global communications infrastructure. In addition to teaching, she’s a liaison to the subsea cable industry trying to help build up their workforce.
The industry needs young people, she says, but there aren’t training schools or training programs. Long ago, there were telecommunications schools, but those dated back to the days of learning how to be a telegraph operator.
The problem is that people who started in the 1980s and ‘90s have decades of experience about how to plan, manufacture, operate, maintain subsea cables. Their institutional knowledge will vanish when they retire, and the next generation may either not know about the subsea cable industry—or not be interested. Starosielski says, “I teach 18- to 22-year-olds, and they come in and they're like, I want to work on the on the latest app. I want to work on AI. So, they're really interested in the interface, but not many people are like, oh my gosh, I want to be an internet plumber.”
Starosielski has become a well-known industry cheerleader, working to entice students to become a part of this global community, which needs everything from lawyers to understand regulatory environments in different countries, to marine biologists, and of course, engineers. Most important she says, is that the industry wants to attract people who are good listeners, since you’re building not only cables between countries but also bridges between cultures.
Starosielski is not on her own in this massive appeal. Industry groups regularly hold conferences for young professionals and do campus outreach. Last month, the University of Genoa in Italy launched the world’s first subsea cable degree program. SubCom, one of four of the world’s subsea cable manufacturers and installers, and the only one in the U.S., is developing talent pipelines by collaborating with universities like the University of New Hampshire and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. SubCom is also expanding internship and apprentice programs. Mary Jackson, the senior director of resources for SubCom, said that in the cable, maritime, and manufacturing sectors, they are facing significant shortages of skilled workers, and that shortage is expected to grow as older workers retire. Jackson said, “When we talk about technology, the average age of workers in our industry is increasing with a large portion nearing retirement.”
Jackson added that one problem is that a lot of younger people think that the base of communications is mostly satellite, but 99 percent of international voice and data is transmitted through fiber optic cables, and a lot of the younger generations don’t know that, and don’t know that opportunities exist in the industry as opposed to looking for work with more well-known companies.
Another problem for SubCom, according to Jackson, is that the workforce is now very used to remote work lifestyles, but in her industry an employee can’t predominantly work from home. The company’s work is either on a vessel installing cable or in a manufacturing facility creating their networks, both of which require being on site. The company is looking for individuals who are really excited about traveling, seeing the world, and being hands-on with the product. She says that someone who wants to work in the industry needs be mindful of other cultures and traditions and be patient with people.
So, what’s Starosielski pitch to young people? She says if you care about the environment and about each other and want to make the world a better place, you should be building the internet's plumbing. She wants to hear from you—especially if your email comes by way of subsea cable. 💧