Did you know that the Internet as we know it depends on 22 ships to function? It likely wouldn’t occur to most people that there are fiber-optic cables running through our oceans all around the world. In fact, there are more than 800,000 miles of cables in our oceans that are carrying 99% of the world’s data.
If things should break? There are a global network of ships that are ready to repair the cables if they break.
Breaks do happen about 200 times a year. There are ships that are designed to repair the cables by using precision engineering.
This type of thing did actually happen in 2011 during the tsunami that hit Japan. There were 12 transpacific cables that were severed and it took 154 days to repair them, but they got fixed.
More than 95% of international data is transmitted by wires at the bottom of the ocean called submarine communications cables. In total, they are hundreds of thousands of miles long and can lie 8000 meters below the surface.
The cables are installed by special boats called cable-layers. As the cable is being laid, special care is considered to avoid coral reefs, fish beds, and habitats.