The Undersea Network

Only forty-five undersea cables extend outward from the continental United States, supporting almost all of the country’s international data transactions.26 If one groups the cables into thirty-mile stretches, one can see that international traffic enters the United States through fewer than twenty zones.

One recent cable that connects Australia and Guam has enough capacity to carry simultaneous phone calls from the entire population of Australia—over twenty million people.

Almost all of Australia’s Internet traffic goes out through a single thirty-mile stretch,

It was not until the large-scale environmental transformation of climate change, however, that a transarctic cable route became feasible.