The lifeblood of global communication flows through more than 807,800 miles worth of garden hose-wide cables woven across the sea floor. These cables, which reportedly transmit over $10 trillion worth of financial data every day, are vulnerable to extreme weather, decay, and, if recent reports are to be believed, acts of sabotage.
The Associated Press estimates that at least 11 cables have been damaged since October 2023 in the Baltic Sea alone. Finnish and German authorities traced several of those incidents back to dragged anchors, which they allege may have been intentionally deployed to cause damage for political ends. Fears of escalating subsea cable sabotage have even prompted NATO to ramp up its military surveillance presence in the region through an all-hands-on-deck mission dubbed “Baltic Sentry.”
But keeping tabs on the Earth’s subsea cables is easier said than done. Physical monitors simply can’t be everywhere at once and current passive detection tools are relatively easy to spot. Optics11, a maritime‑defense company based in the Netherlands, is trying to solve that growing problem with OptiBarrier, an underwater surveillance system it claims can “listen” using light.
The company says OptiBarrier amounts to a “network of sensors” on the seafloor, capable of detecting minute variations in the way light travels through the cables. Advanced computer models back on shore then analyze those irregularities to identify and locate vessels sneaking around where they shouldn’t be. If detected early, these sensors could serve as a first line of defense against subsea‑cable sabotage.
“We can deploy several of the sensors that we have at different areas in the sea and all of them are registering acoustic signatures from all the vessels and all the…
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