When the Internet is mentioned, “clouds” usually come to mind. We use internet-based "cloud computing services" to email someone. Or, if we have a website, we host it not on our home computer but on a remote server that provides this service. Since the location of that remote server is not where we are, we say that it is in the "cloud", which is an abstract concept. The irony is this: when we send an e-mail or visit a website, communication with others occurs below, not above. As of the beginning of 2020, 99% of all international communication on the internet, including this video you are watching right now, is provided by 468 cable lines laid under the sea. That's all! 468 wires. Of course, some of them are only 131 kilometers long, and some are 20,000 kilometers long. However, if you cut one of those cables, the internet of a whole continent can go.
As a matter of fact, such an event happened in 2018. There is a cable of approximately 17,000 km, starting from France and reaching all the way to South Africa. This cable connects 22 countries on the west coast of Europe and Africa to each other and to the internet. Thanks to a trawler fishing boat, the internet of 10 countries was cut off when the cable accidentally broke. The guys have officially given a new perspective to the concept of "internet trolling"!
That's not the only problem with cables. How
could it be? We are talking about 1.2 million km of cables in total. Every
year, around 200 large and small problems are encountered. Sometimes ships
anchor on the cable by mistake, and sometimes these cables can be damaged due
to earthquakes or underwater volcanic eruptions. In 2007, sea pirates stole 11
kilometers of a cable connecting Thailand, Vietnam and Hong Kong and sold it as
scrap for 100 tons. The guys have officially brought a new perspective to the
concept of "internet piracy"!
And when sharks get hungry, they may want
to taste the internet cable. These images are from another event but were first
discovered off the Canary Islands, where sharks might want to eat the cables. According
to this book examining communication networks under the sea, engineers laying
cables in that area in 1985 soon noticed that there was a short circuit in the
electrical cable leading to the signal booster. When they examined it to
understand how it came into contact with the water, they were surprised to find
shark teeth on the cable. Rodents such as squirrels were known to haunt the
cables on land, but the sharks had nothing to do with the cables. Marine
biologists were even more baffled, because until then it was unknown that
sharks could go 1km deep in water. As a result of the tests carried out by the
biologists in the water tanks, it was revealed that not the cables, but the
electric field created by the current passing through them, and they are
affected by such areas in finding their own prey. Cable manufacturers also had
to reconsider their insulation materials to be able to destroy this area and
protect their cables.
When we think of internet cable, we think
of cables as thick as one finger, which we use in our homes. This is an
ethernet cable. It transmits data electrically. It is a cheap method, but it is
not preferred over long distances as there is a lot of signal loss in such
cables. There is also wireless internet. In this method, data is transmitted by
radio waves.
So what can be done to send huge amounts
of data without losing signal for thousands of kilometers and most importantly
very quickly? Look, I'm saying very fast. What goes faster than electricity? Light,
of course. In order to carry data at the speed of light, it is necessary to
carry them with light, and fiber optic cables are used for this. There may be
such cables in homes, especially for connecting music systems. If you have one,
you can connect one end and see the red laser light coming from the other end. Because
there is glass inside these cables you know. When it sends light into the glass
at a certain angle, it reflects and moves forward. By sending light at
different angles into the same cable, different data can be carried at the same
time. Hundreds of terabits of information. In other words, millions of videos
like the one you are watching can be transmitted simultaneously. Moreover, the
thickness of these optical fibers is as much as a human hair. Of course, you
can't lay them under the ocean naked, even anchovies eat them with pleasure,
let alone sharks. (Of course, you will say now, do anchovies live in the ocean?
Of course, there are Australian anchovy, there is Argentine anchovy living in
the Pacific Ocean, in the Atlantic Ocean). Anyway, these hair-thin cables are
wrapped with 7 separate layers of different materials such as gel, plastic,
steel, copper, polycarbonate, aluminum, and polyethylene so that nothing can
happen to them.
After the cables are produced in this way,
they are wound on large reels because they are very long. Very large reels. These
reels are loaded onto ships that will lay them under the sea in about a month.
Because they are indeed being lowered to the ocean floor. If the bottom is
soft, the cable is buried in the ground thousands of meters underwater at some
points. If the base is hard, it is left on the bottom. Of course, it is
necessary to make very careful calculations about how nervous he should be. In
addition, since there are coral reefs or shipwrecks in some places, plans are
made months in advance so that the cable does not become entangled there.
It is truly astonishing to learn that such
hard work is done for the internet we use every day. Thanks to these studies,
new discoveries can be made, as in the shark example I gave at the beginning of
the video. I will talk about a very important geographical discovery made in
this way shortly. So why all these troubles and costs? Because being on the
internet offers advantages to everyone, from large companies to small personal
entrepreneurs.
Did anything catch your attention in this
cable network that carries 99% of the internet? One of the places on the map
where these cables are most concentrated is the Atlantic Ocean. So what's on
the bottom of that ocean? Mountain ranges from the North Pole to Bouvet Island
in the Southern Hemisphere. Yes, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, there are
mountains under the water that stretch along the entire floor. In fact, the
high parts of some of them rise to the surface of the water in places and form
islands in the ocean. Iceland is one of these islands.
We know all this geographical information
very well now. In fact, when laying cables under the ocean, using this
information, how many cables will be needed and how they will be passed over
submarine mountains at different heights are always calculated accordingly. We
know this because these sub-ocean mountain ranges were discovered in 1872,
again during a transatlantic cable-laying attempt. Even back then, this very
difficult job could be done.
You must have heard of the person who
first implemented the idea of laying cables under water. Samuel Morse. The
person who gave his name to the Morse code used in telegrams. For the first
time in 1842, he tested whether a telegraphic message could be transmitted
securely by laying a 3 km long cable under the sea in New York. Only 16 years
later, the first cable, thousands of kilometers long, connected Europe and the
Americas. In 1858, the first telegraph message to cross the Atlantic ocean
reached America. The message was sent in 17 hours and 40 minutes because even a
word took a few minutes to be written and delivered. Today, trillions of words
of information can be sent every second through cables as thin as a hair. For
example, 208 Terabits of information per second can be carried through the 6605
km long MAREA cable, one of the last cables laid in 2018.
But this should not be forgotten either.
Before that first cable was laid, it took a month for any information to reach
the Americas from Europe, depending on the speed of the winds and the ships.
One more month to reply to that message. 163 years ago, people could only
communicate at this speed. Humanity's efforts to speed up communication have
laid millions of kilometers of cables under the waters in just two human
lifetimes, while those cables were being laid, mountain ranges long enough to
encircle half the world were discovered under the oceans, information was
gained about life thousands of meters deep in the sea, and finally telegraph
cables turned into fiber optic internet cables. What's next? Bringing the
internet to earth-orbiting satellites? If the speed of these satellites one day
exceeds the speed of the cables, that day we will be able to talk about the
internet in the clouds for real. Until then, keep it in mind. The websites you
enter or the e-mails you send or the videos you watch do not come from the
clouds, but from below, thousands of meters deep in the oceans.
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