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Network The Internet

Shrinking Arctic Ice Redraws the Map For Internet Cable Connections (politico.eu) 14

Thawing ice in the Arctic may open up new routes for internet cables that lie at the bottom of the ocean and carry most international data traffic. And more routes matter when underwater infrastructure is at risk of attack. From a report: Baltic Sea gas and telecoms cables were damaged last year, with a Chinese vessel a potential suspect. Red Sea data cables were cut last month after a Yemeni government warning of attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Over 90 percent of all Europe-Asia traffic flows through the Red Sea route. The problem of critical data relying on only one path is clear. "It's clearly a kind of concentration of several cables, which means that there is a risk that areas will bottleneck," Taneli Vuorinen, the executive vice president at Cinia, a Finland-based company working on an innovative pan-Arctic cable, said.

"In order to meet the increasing demand, there's an increasing pressure to find diversity" of routes, he said. The Far North Fiber project is seeking to offer just that. The 14,500 kilometer long cable will directly link Europe to Japan, via the Northwest Passage in the Arctic, with landing sites in Japan, the United States (Alaska), Canada, Norway, Finland and Ireland. It would have been unthinkable until just a few years ago, when a thick, multiyear layer of ice made navigation impossible. But the Arctic is warming up at a worrying pace with climate change, nearly four times faster than the rest of the world. Sea ice is shrinking by almost 13 percent every decade.

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Shrinking Arctic Ice Redraws the Map For Internet Cable Connections

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  • Other risks (Score:4, Insightful)

    by necro81 ( 917438 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2024 @11:26AM (#64363990) Journal
    This avoids some risks from the Red Sea. Having an alternate route between Europe and Asia is good for resilience. However, the route does border along Russia for most of its length, and comes mighty close to it through the very shallow Bering Strait. Chances of Russia tapping that cable, or severing it for the lulz?
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 02, 2024 @11:54AM (#64364064)

    From 2008 ...
    https://www.theglobeandmail.co... [theglobeandmail.com]

    • That's not what the study says. That's not even what the scientist said. From your link:

      "I now believe that the Arctic will be out of multiyear ice in the summertime as early as 2015; it is coming very quickly," Dr. Barber said.

      i.e. he described a lower bound, not an upper bound. Further, even this was only a single scientist's opinion, and the study itself [google.com.au] makes no such claim.

      It's amusing how climate deniers love to jump on mangled second- or third-hand reporting, hoping that this somehow discredits the science itself. Meanwhile, the decades of hard evidence keep piling up.

  • I'm a bit surprised they didn't consider this before. I mean, in the past you'd need an icebreaker, but they've been traversing the passage since well before the Internet Age.

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