Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

There is one problem that no arctic cable advocate ever mentions, namely ice scouring. Neither NorduNet nor the Polar Connect team will ever mention this challenge. It is taboo. Here's the problem. Only 10% of an iceberg lies above sea's surface. Salt water is more dense than fresh water and fresh water ice. Hence icebergs are largely undersea and their tooth can extend as deep as 250 meters. In the shallow waters surrounding the Bering Strait the average depth is well under 60 meters. So the tooth or fang of a large iceberg can carve grooves in the sea bed ranging from 50 centimeters to 20 meters. While most ice gouges aare closer to 50 centimeters than 20 meters, deep groves have accumulated on the sea floor. Moreover, the measured depth is not necessarily the original depth of the groove due to sediment burial over time. An iceberg damaged the North Alaskan Quintillian cable in June 2023. It dug a groove 3 meters deep into the sea floor and severed the buried cable. The site...

The map shows the ultimate challenge for any cable crossing the North Pole. The Bering Strait is the exit for any polar project trying to reach Asia. But the average depth is only 30 to 50 meters. As you learned in school, the Bering Strait was a land bridge during the last Ice Age lasting from 37,500 to 12,000 years ago. The lower the temperature, the more water vapor is deposited as snow and ice on land. Hence the oceans recede as temperatures fall.  The construction rule of thumb is to bury a submarine cable when the sea is a thousand meters or less deep. This means a polar cable must be buried for over two thousand kilometers as the map shows. The North Alaskan coastal Quintillion cable's burial depth varies between two and four meters with a maximum of 12 meters. Deep burial is intended to protect the cable from icebergs scraping the sea floor in shallow water. A dual cable design raises per meter cost because the protect path would traverse the more shallow Russian side of t...