This has sea monster written all over it.
What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like
31–40 of 264 posts
Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe you're thinking about Nord Stream
What would the Russian motivation be for blowing that up? They could have just turned off the gas supply.
They left one pipe of NS2. It would have been a political victory for Putin with humiliation of the German government if they had switched to this instead of stopping gas imports via NS1&2 completely.
Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like
#33Let's assume that these incidents actually were accidents, there's still a bigger question open: why is trawler fishing still allowed? Imagine it's not a fiber cable that ends up being crushed by a trawl door... but all the other marine life: Fish can swim away (or not, being the point of getting fished), but plants, corals, bugs?
Trawler fishing is devastating for the local ecology, we just don't see the damage - to quote [1], page 16:
> Seabed habitats are under significant pressure across European seas from the cumulative impacts of demersal fishing, coastal developments and other activities. Preliminary results from a study presented in SWD(2020) indicate that about 43% of Europe’s shelf/slope area and 79% of the coastal seabed is considered to be physically disturbed, which is mainly caused by bottom trawling. A quarter of the EU’s coastal area has probably lost its seabed habitats.
Honestly I'm pretty much in favor of banning trawler fishing and the import of trawler-fished fish into the European Union, even if it's just to protect our fiber links.
[1] https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/720778d4-bb17...
Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like
#34This reminds me of a story in "Blind Man's Bluff," summary:
[Capt James F. Bradley Jr.] was at his office in Naval Intelligence one day at 3 a.m. when the St. Louis native began reflecting on his boyhood life on the Mississippi River. As he later told the authors, he recalled that the river beach was dotted with signs warning, “Cable Crossing — Do Not Anchor,” so a boater would not foul the cable.
At that point, he wondered if the Soviets did not have similar signs along their Arctic coasts to prevent their critical cables, including those used by the KGB and the Soviet Northern Fleet, from being damaged.
As a result of these ponderings, in 1971 the American submarine Halibut, with its periscope up, slowly and secretly traced the Siberian coast looking for telltale warning signs. The cable signs were found, and American divers put a tap at the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk on Soviet communications.
https://stationhypo.com/2021/09/05/remembering-captain-james...
Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like
#35What, no mention that the Norwegian police use evidence markers with inches printed on them? That company sells them with CM markers.
Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like
#36> The current is used to amplify the fibre optic signals that flow through the 1300km long cables between the peninsula and the Norwegian mainland. This is magic to me. Anyone have a search term I could use to better understand how electricity is used to boost a fibre optic signal?
I don’t know about this cable specifically, but it can be done by transferring more power to the optical signal. Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers work by utilizing a nonlinear optical effect where energy is transferred from a pump laser to the signal. This is in principle possible in any optical (glass) fiber, but by doping with exotic elements, the amplification characteristics can be optimized. Erbium is suitable for…
This is still a good practical reference I like to point out, when people ask: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWqe8_5SUvk Richard A. Steenbergen has also other good talks, e.g. on traceroute. There are multiple versions of these talks that include more or less the same stuff with occasionally more information here and there.
Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like
#37> The critically important cable that connects Svalbard to the mainland is no thicker than a pinkie finger This is amazing. I wonder how much data per unit of time this is capable of transporting. Wikipedia says "Each segment has a speed of 10 gigabits per second (Gb/s), with a future potential capacity of 2,500 Gbit/s." [1] Wikipedia also notes that NASA helped fund this system. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sva…
I think NASA helped fund it because they wanted more (And more reliable) data to a groundstation on the island, not because this subsea cable is anything special. Fibre optic is great because you can usually add more bandwidth by lighting up another wavelength. The amplifiers don't need to be substituted if the wavelength is within its range.
I've wondered in the past: is there an actual theoretical upper limit based on the physicality of it on the bandwidth of a single fibre link?
Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like
#38Let's assume that these incidents actually were accidents, there's still a bigger question open: why is trawler fishing still allowed? Imagine it's not a fiber cable that ends up being crushed by a trawl door... but all the other marine life: Fish can swim away (or not, being the point of getting fished), but plants, corals, bugs? Trawler fishing is devastating for the local ecology, we just don't see the damage - to…
I agree. The more you learn about trawling the less you’ll understand why it’s still permitted in so many places.
Where I live it’s cut back dramatically, but the bizarre thing is that it’s strictly permitted in territories where we know rare deep sea glass sponge reefs exist, and once thrived. These reefs are islands of immense diversity and biomass which fed huge numbers of transient species moving through the deep. They were also nurseries for a large number of fish species we commonly fish for.
We work so hard to regulate our fisheries yet do so little to properly protect the resources they extract from a holistic perspective.
Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
The optical signal repeaters that are part of the cable every N kilometers need power to do their job.
Ohh there’s physical electronic repeaters. Okay. I thought this was some sort of electromagnetism witchcraft.
They actually are witchcraft. They amplify the signal directly, without transforming it into electrical signal.
Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like
#40> The current is used to amplify the fibre optic signals that flow through the 1300km long cables between the peninsula and the Norwegian mainland. This is magic to me. Anyone have a search term I could use to better understand how electricity is used to boost a fibre optic signal?
I don’t know about this cable specifically, but it can be done by transferring more power to the optical signal. Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers work by utilizing a nonlinear optical effect where energy is transferred from a pump laser to the signal. This is in principle possible in any optical (glass) fiber, but by doping with exotic elements, the amplification characteristics can be optimized. Erbium is suitable for…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_amplifier#Doped_fiber_...
The crush to the cable could be a number of things but without knowing the terrain, and knowing these cables just lie on the sea floor, it could be caused by the cable sitting on some jagged rock and has been pulled tight elsewhere (perhaps by fisherman dredging the seabed) resulting in the cable being forced onto the jagged rock and it being crushed onto the rock.
Likewise, but unlikely, some heavy object from above has some how landed on the cable, perhaps even a submarine of sorts resting on the seabed.
Again knowledge of the terrain of the sea floor where the cable crush took place is key into gaining some idea of what might have happened, but I think its the first scenario, a fisherman dredging the sea floor elsewhere has caught and pulled the cable tight and the cable crush is the damage from it resting on rocks where its snagged and crushed itself from the tautness.
Rock climbers and abseilers using ropes will see this with their ropes.