"The Fracture of the Sea of Light: 2000s-2010s: Undersea Cables and the New Crisis."

"The Fracture of the Sea of Light: 2000s-2010s: Undersea Cables and the New Crisis."

Since the 2000s, global data communications have almost without exception depended on submarine cables, which have been the blood vessel of the 21st century information society. However, behind this structure lurked the shadows of physical vulnerability and strategic tension.

At the time, many submarine cables relied on a limited number of "landing points" to connect to land, despite the fact that they passed through vast undersea areas. If those points were occupied or destroyed, communications would be cut off, financial markets would plummet, and cascading damage could occur to the national economy. The British and other relevant authorities recognized this as "the greatest weakness" as well as a "strategic target" for attack.

In this period, technological elements such as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology, regenerative optical amplifiers, multiplex routing, and optical amplification repeaters continued to evolve. As a result, dozens to hundreds of wavelengths could be transmitted simultaneously within a single optical fiber, dramatically expanding the communication bandwidth. In addition, cable laying technology has also been upgraded to support deep-sea, high-pressure environments, and curve resistance. However, the "concentration on landing sites" remained almost unchanged, and this emerged as a strategic focus.

Internationally, the U.S. and British intelligence agencies' (NSA and GCHQ) submarine cable interception and surveillance programs came to light with the later Snowden revelations. This led to the realization that submarine communications infrastructure is more than just a civilian technology; it is the front line of national security. In the words of the British authorities, the expression "a major weakness and at the same time a great opportunity" referred precisely to submarine cables as this "weak point that could be attacked.

Even in recent years, there have been reports that Russia has been operating vessels for survey and destruction in the vicinity of the submarine cables. In addition, reports of suspected state-sponsored cable destruction and severing are on the rise as a result of geopolitical tensions. In addition, recent research has proposed the reuse of existing submarine optical fiber as "Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS)" to detect vessel movement in the vicinity of the seafloor. Such technology has the potential to contribute to "enhanced monitoring" of landing sites and cable routes, but there are still many challenges to its practical application.

Thus, the 2000s-2010s was a time when the physical constraints and geopolitical risks of the fiber-optic network began to become apparent along with its expansion. Looking to the future, redundancy, distributed grounding points, multiple pathways, and the convergence of real-time monitoring technologies are essential challenges.