Submarine Cable Map

2021: Creating a 3D Map of Submarine Internet Cables

At the end of September 2021, information appeared that a 3D map of underwater Internet cables had been created. The data was visualized by programmer Tyler Morgan-Wall using a simple script and GeoJSON, an open source format for visualizing geographical objects.

The data was obtained from the website Submarine Cable Map, which is managed by TeleGeography, a company specializing in geographical data. According to the project, there are 426 active submarine cables in the world. The cables mainly have the diameter of a garden hose and are filled with threads wide from human hair.

3D map of underwater Internet cables created

The cables lie at the bottom of the ocean and stretch for more than 1.3 million km. Some of them are very short, connecting the islands at a distance of several km, such as a cable connecting Ireland and Great Britain. Others, like one of the cables connecting Asia with the USA, have a length of more than 16 thousand km.

Since 2000, data has been transmitted through fiber optic cables, because this is much faster and cheaper than trying to forward messages from satellites and through radio waves, and every year their total distance in km only grows. The fact that people are not able to lay them all through our increasingly congested land, as well as we cannot really build telegraph cables stretching over the Atlantic Ocean. Cables are broken and need repair, and new ones are laid all the time. Contrary to common myth, sharks do not tend to bite cables.

Some notable examples include that as of September 27, 2021, it is the most powerful underwater Internet cable in the world: a 9 thousand km long connection between Oregon in the USA and Taiwan in Japan, this Google cable and a consortium of other communications companies.

For laying cable under water, specially designed vessels are required, which can lay from 100 to 150 km of cable per day. Fiber optic cables are very brittle, so they are surrounded by layers of tubes and steel to prevent damage. There are more common threats to cables, such as construction projects that accidentally damage cables, or even anchors that fell from a boat.^[1]

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