UNDERWATER CONNECTIONS

Have you ever wondered how an email from the US makes its way to Germany? The answer is under the sea. Snaking beneath the world’s oceans are miles of submarine optical fibre. The cables run from coast to coast and from continents to islands, connecting everywhere except Antarctica in a literal World Wide Web. About the width of a sausage, each cable contains strands of glass that transmit data as pulses of light. Those strands are wrapped in layers of insulation and buried beneath the seafloor by ships carrying specialist ploughs. This helps to protect them from everything from corrosion to shark bites.