A Subsea Cable to Antarctica?

Might there be a day soon where the last major landmass on the Earth gets connected via subsea cable? Well, a project that would connect Chile with Antarctica is at least getting a feasibility study according to a release yesterday.

The Chilean Undersecretariat of Telecommunications, the Development Bank for Latin America and the Caribbean, Pioneer Consulting, and Salience Consulting shave signed an agreement to produce a feasibility study to build a submarine cable that would connect the Antarctic Peninsula and/or the South Shetland Islands back to Puerto Williams in Chie’s Magallanes region.

Of course, such a cable will need to have governments involved, as building an economic case otherwise would be challenging. The entire human population ranges from just 1,000 during the long winter to 5,000 during the austral summer. Most are there for scientific purposes, and plenty of data is being produced that needs transport. Connectivity thus far has been mostly via satellite.

Chile is not the only potential point of connectivity of course. Scientists have talked about starting from New Zealand as well in the past. But that’s the stage it’s been at: scientists would really like more bandwidth to hook up more sensors and build larger data sets for use globally. So they make the case for public money to make it happen somehow.

But there have to be some engineering challenges to worry about as well. Landing a cable onto a dynamic ice sheet in the southern ocean would have to involve quite a lot of unique problems even after you get it there. And while keeping a watch for icebergs you’d be working along an ocean floor that is much less well mapped than, say, the North Atlantic.  It’s only about 700 miles of raw distance if you take the shortest route, but then the challenge becomes transporting the data terrestrially, because, you know, it’s like a continent or something.

Yet sooner or later such a cable will be laid. Will it be this time? It’s just a feasibility study, and even that won’t be ready until April 26.  But hey, bring it on.  Someone tell the AI guys about the free cooling possibilities.

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Categories: Undersea cables