Submarine cables: The overlooked Achilles' heel in global infrastructure

A few days ago, news broke that someone had severed three very important telecommunications cables at the bottom of the Red Sea, leading global media to point fingers at the Houthi - a Yemeni armed group known for its solidarity with Hamas and for disrupting global trade by targeting cargo ships passing through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea.

Though blaming the Houthi for threatening submarine infrastructure isn't new, this situation appears to be more complex.

DE-CIX's analysis suggests that Yemeni terrorists aren't directly to blame for the communication breakdown. Instead, the crew of the Rubymar, a Belize-flagged bulk carrier measuring approximately 171 metres in length and displacing around 32,000 tonnes, is likely responsible.

On February 18th, the ship was targeted by an anti-ship missile. At that time, its cargo holds were full of fertilizers, but it was the fuel leakage, creating a 40-kilometre slick on the Red Sea's surface, that initially caused the most alarm.

The damaged ship was subsequently abandoned by its crew, who, in an effort to mitigate the risk posed by the drifting ghost vessel, dropped anchor.

The anchor, however, did not secure the ship, and the crewless vessel continued to drift for several more days, dragging the anchor across the seabed. This action, according to DE-CIX, led to damage to the submarine cables before the abandoned Rubymar ultimately sank on March 2nd.

This isn't the first instance of a dragged anchor destroying underwater infrastructure. In October 2023, the gas pipeline Balticconnector sustained damage in a similar manner across the Baltic Sea bed between Finland and Estonia.

The Chinese ship Newnew Polar Bear is believed to be responsible. Its anchor was discovered at the site of the damage (probably because the Chinese authorities refuse to cooperate). All anchors were accounted for when the ship left Kaliningrad for St. Petersburg, but one was missing upon arrival in St. Petersburg.

In this case, it's unclear whether the damage to the Baltic sea bed was an unlucky accident or a calculated act aimed at disrupting the infrastructure connecting EU and NATO countries.

The incidents show how easily submarine cables and gas pipelines can be damaged. There's no need for underwater saboteurs; a sizeable ship and an anchor are enough to disrupt data exchange between Europe, Asia, and North Africa in the Red Sea, reducing the capacity of intercontinental links by about 25%.

To paralyze information exchange in the region, particularly in the Red Sea, wouldn't be difficult. After all, 35 cables, 15 of which are laid on the Red Sea bed, handle 90% of data exchange between Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. The implications of a ship dragging its anchor from one coast to the other across these cables are not hard to imagine.

Information powers the modern economy. Just as the 19th century was marked by steel and coal, and the 20th by oil and nuclear energy, today's fuel is data, circulating in ever-growing volumes.

Paralyzing the global economy, surprisingly, is easier than it seems. Scenarios range from an attack on the 13 root servers that manage top-level domains, to cutting off the world's most crucial data centers (though their number is significantly higher), to crippling intercontinental communication by destroying submarine cables.

The residents of the Shetlands had a taste of an information Armageddon in October 2022 when their communication lines went dead, payment terminals stopped working, and internet services were cut off.

The disruption, likely caused by a fishing vessel, affected just the community of 23,000 people at that time.

With unpredictable leaders like Putin threatening global peace and security, the activities of Russian "academic" vessels raise legitimate concerns. These ships, such as the Akademik Boris Petrov, the Akademik Treshnikov, the Akademik Nikolay Strakhov, and the Jantar (introduced in 2015), are officially designated for marine bottom research. Equipped with various types of underwater vehicles, they have spent years extensively exploring the seabed in the North Atlantic and near the eastern coast of the United States, where critical submarine telecommunication cables between Europe and America lie.