The Monster That Slays Arctic Subsea Cables: Icebergs

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 was 34 US miles or 55 kilometers offshore. It took almost four months to restore service despite the summer season. Then in January 2025, an iceberg gouged another 3 meter deep grove into the sea floor and snapped Quintillion. This happened over 30 US miles offshore. Because this outage happened in winter, management had to postpone the repair until sea ice has sufficiently dispersed to allow a standard cable ship to locate the fault and repair it in September, 2025. Without an icebreaker, there was nothing to be done.

James Bond counsels us to never say never. Nonetheless, it is difficult to see how investors would rationalize a $3 billion to $4 billion investment with such an uncertain payoff. Furthermore, let's address the sovereignty angle. There are no international waters in the Bering Strait. The Russian Federation and the US have divided up the Bering Strait between them. So any so-called European cable would require US or Russian permits. Tapping cables has limited value, which is why intelligence agencies have largely abandoned it. Their focus is on intercepting messages before or after they are encrypted or decrypted. The intelligence agencies target servers and end user devices, not encrypted traffic. While it is true that the NSA does lots of meta-analysis using IP address headers, there is no evidence that data payloads have been decoded. So European governments should focus not on sovereign cables, whatever that means, but rather highly secure layer 3 IT infrastructure.

Photo of a Glacier Showing That Most Of It Is Below the Water Surface

Diagam of An Iceberg Ice Scouring


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