Where Do All Of Our Tweets Go?
At the time I type this in 2009 humanity is capable of sending data anywhere on earth in milliseconds by way of fiber optic cables. These data are sent as a series of light pulses traveling at the speed of light around the globe through submarine cables. A massive system of cables are gently draped along the seafloor oftentimes miles deep into the great abyss. Our text messages, cell phone calls and shared media can make their way from a cellphone in San Francisco to a laptop in Shanghai in less than five tenths of a second! One may draw the connection between a pattern of light pulses and the clicks of Morse Code to imagine how our communication technologies have evolved over generations.
In the case of the United States specifically, as much as 80% of our data travels to and from Asia making landfall on the west coast beneath the slow, rolling waves of San Luis Obispo, California. Following the events of September 11th, the Patriot Act made it legal for the US government to monitor all digital communication coming into or out of the country. It did so by cloning the massive cable bundle on the west coast and routing it directly into the government's mainframe of supercomputers. As fascinating as this all is, the most mind boggling aspect to me is that we are able to run cables along the entire ocean floor! How does that even work? What happens if a cable is damaged or eaten by a giant sea monster living down in the depths? Feeling like I had to know the a, I reached answers to thisl, I reached out to a professional in the Fiber Optics industry on a website called aardvark.com (now inactive). Here is what I was able to find out.
Me: Does anyone know if Fiber-optic cables are embedded into the floor of the Pacific Ocean, laid on top of the sea floor or somehow hovering above it?
Jeremy (fiber optic industry expert): The cables are laid on the bottom of the floor, not dug under the sea bed nor are they floating
Me: Thank you, this still seems slightly unfathomable though, how doesn't it get damaged often?
Jeremy: Actually they (Fiber Optic cables) get damaged quite often, and there is a fleet of vessels responsible for fixing cuts when they occur. Recently there were widespread outages in the middle east due to multiple simultaneously damaged cables. There are many redundant cables, so while it's common for any given cable to be damaged it's rare that enough of them will be damaged at any given time to cause an outage. Here's an article about how they repair them: http://www.slate.com/id/2156987
2009 Submarine Fiber Optics World Map (click to enlarge).
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