The Quintillion Cable: Lessons For the EU's Arctic Cable Aspirations - II
The illustration on top shows the Arctic cable's main predator: icebergs. In waters 500 meters or less deep, floating icebergs carve grooves in the seabed floor. These scars are typically one to two meters deep with the record being 15 meters. A fair number of grooves are carved 5 to 8.5 meters into the floor. Known as ice scouring, icebergs have left marks in water as deep as a thousand meters. These comments apply to both the North Pole and the Antarctic. Cables connecting either region to the rest of the world face this challenge. According to a US Government Geological survey, Canada's Beaufort Sea, highlighted in blue, has at least 2,200 ice scouring marks on its sea floor. Quintillion's cable extends into this region. Any cable linking Europe to Asia via the Arctic must go through the Bering Sea. Geological surveys have shown that ice scouring happens every year in the Bering Sea as wind and currents drive ice floes across waters as shallow as 20 meters. Although the ...