There are 1.4 million km (870,000 miles) of telecommunication cables on the seafloor, covering every ocean on the planet. Telecommunication cables can be used as “acoustic sensors” to detect whales, ships, storms and earthquakes in the high seas.
The damage caused to cables offers the industry “fundamental new understandings about hazards that exist in the deep sea,” says Mike Clare, the International Cable Protection Committee’s marine environmental advisor. “We’d never have known that there were landslides under the sea after volcanic eruptions if it wasn’t from the damage that was created.”
Story by BBC
