It's so wild that basically all the information exchanged by humanity gets squeezed down to a few choke points

4:30 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️ galvanized steel mentioned 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️

I am a retired splicing technician for the phone company and I have had the pleasure of splicing in a new submarine cable to cut around a damaged section caused by a boat anchor in the Kanawha River. Two days of shift work in a tent by the river to open up the armored cable. splice the 1600 pairs of phone wires to restore service, and then meticulously seal it up and pressure test it. The crossing was well marked and I heard the barge operator got some healthy fines. Someone had to pay for our hard work! :)

"guy she told you not to worry about" 😂

Chafing is one of my most insidious natural hazards too

I stayed at bed and breakfast down near Gig Harbor Washington, home to one of the most massive Naval bases on the US West coast. We got inside, and the hostess were a homemaker and a man retired out of the navy. While she was showing my wife the decorating, he took me downstairs to his man cave / bar for a drink. On the bar was a weird item in a glass presentation case. He asked me to guess what it was and me knowing quite a bit about things immediately identified it as a section of an undersea Communications cable. This man was the former commander of the nuclear submarine USS Flounder, in a secret Mission decades ago,his crew located on the sea floor, and removd a section of Russian undersea military communications cable and added a recording device and this was a section of that cable taken on that mission.

4:29 so disappointing it wasn't galvanised square steel fastened with screws borrowed from an aunt

Also, imagine literally digging up undersea cables to scrap copper, mental.

The US used nuclear submarines to attach equipment to tap into Soviet undersea cables during the Cold War. I assume that still happens on both sides.

Revives memories of how slow the internet was in the 90's because of the lack of undersea cables & the number of personal servers in UK dorm rooms instead of AWS virginia.

The "ch" in gutta percha is pronounced like the "ch" in chair.

I've been watching you for years and love the balance you strike between pure facts and good jokes. Thank you for injecting yourself and some lovely comedy into the content :)

Understandably methods for attacking cable are rarely talked about, what is public knowledge is largely what was done fifty years ago. Countries play their defences against such attacks even closer to their chests.

I was an undersea cable one time, and I can confirm that it’s problematic.

At the end of last year a gas line connecting Finland and Estonia and an undersea cable connecting Sweden and Estonia were damaged. It is indeed hard to protect these undersea assets and easy to deniably attack them.

A good friend of mine, trained as ME, worked in BL served as Undersea Cable system engineer and dual-reporting to AT&T Undersea Cable business unit in late 80s and on, until sold to Tyco. He said shark bites were/are the common occurrence. We theorized that - in electrical signal transmission, although at T3 speed, the pulses and harmonics emit RFI, electric shield (steel armor as emission shield) does not work too well. - Since the new TAT-8 has just transitioned to optical fibers but the problem still did not go away, so the working theory is magnetism! <-- it is due to HV DC*1 is carried within (to supply power to intermediate nodes*2). This uni-direction flow of DC current generated very strong magnetic field and the sharks are very sensitive to that (and would bite.) *1. DC current is one way passing through cable sheath, the return path is "Sea Water"!!! *2 There are many of them, not just for signal regeneration and/or multiplexing. Other "undisclosed functions" were/are deployed. Undersea (under the sea) is fun, isn't it?

I used to repair the machinery that made those cables at Phelps-Dodge in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. 1980

Granted I do mechanical/nuclear engineering but the engineering of communications cable never ceases to amaze me. Had a great Senior Staff I&C engineer teach me all about communications protocols, wiring, how to spec and use it, etc. It all makes the engineering of these undersea cables look like child's play.

I am really loving the humor in your videos. I cracked up at "The guy she told you not to worry about"

Sharks find prey and other objects with an organ that can discern electric fields, organic or artificial. They are more than likely able to sense the cable's power output and was attracted to it thinking it might be prey.