Smart telecom cables: climate change hope for Pacific or submarine spying tech?
- An international team is working on new monitoring technology to be used on subsea telecommunications cables
- Proponents say it will provide data on climate change and tsunami threats. Sceptics say it could be used for espionage
Over the next two years the number of undersea telecommunications cables under the Pacific Ocean is to grow by nearly twenty-five per cent as six new projects come online.
The new cables will not only connect millions of island residents across thousands of miles of ocean, but could also be used in the fight against what Pacific Island leaders say is their most pressing existential threat: climate change.
An international team of scientists has been working for nearly a decade to get ocean monitoring sensors included on telecommunications cables – a project dubbed “Scientific Monitoring And Reliable Telecommunications”, or Smart.
By communicating real-time data about the ocean, cables with Smart capability could provide governments advance warning of seismic events and tsunami, and give scientists a continuous flow of information about changes in the world’s oceans caused by climate change.
But though this may sound like a silver-bullet solution to two of the Pacific’s most pressing challenges, security concerns have kept the project from getting out of the lab and into the water.
