Undersea Cable That Changed the World Is Surfacing

We live in a digital world, but it’s one supported by a not-so-digital reality: giant undersea cables. A story at Wired by Jane Ruffino provides a fascinating reminder as she tracks the quiet retirement of TAT-8, the first fiber-optic line to span the Atlantic—and the system that helped turn “phone cables” into the physical backbone of today’s global internet. Installed in 1988 and shut down in 2002, TAT-8 carried traffic through the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the web, and the first social networks. Now, a specialized crew aboard the MV Maasvliet is hauling the aging line off the seabed so its steel, copper, and plastic can be recycled, freeing up proven routes for new, higher-capacity cables.

Ruffino uses that salvage job to dismantle enduring myths about such cables (including supposed shark attacks) and spotlight the small workforce that physically builds, fixes, and, in this case, un-builds the infrastructure. “Fiber-optic transmission is a near-magical way of carrying information by pulses of light,” explains Ruffino. “Most people don’t even think about how quickly we’ve accepted instantaneous communication as normal, even those of us who can remember when an international phone call had to be booked in advance.”

It’s possible “because of the daily work of a few thousand people sometimes at sea, other times buried under piles of permits, surveys, and purchase orders for thousands of kilometers of cables that will join the millions of kilometers of cables on the seabed that ensure that our planet is continuously being hugged by light.” Read the full story, which raises doubts that satellites will someday supplant cables.