The Cloud Under The Sea

The Verge today released a beautifully written and designed feature on the rarely thought of network of undersea cables that transfer data around the world and the people who are responsible for installing and repairing them.

Here’s a blurb from the article:

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.

In addition to learning about how we are presently managing these systems, there’s also some fascinating insight into the history of submarine communications cables, which were first laid in the 1850s (yes, that’s the middle of the 19th century, not a typo!).

This is a lengthy feature. It’s worth your time, if for no other reason than to gain a slightly better understanding of how incredible it is that we are all connected and can access virtually anything from anywhere in the world with little wait despite living on a planet that’s 71 percent water.