Comments by "Steven Gill" (@stevengill1736) on "The Hazardous Life of an Undersea Cable" video.

  1. Yes.,.it was fascinating hearing those stories. I sat spellbound for a couple hours listening to a YouTube discussion of that with interviews of you Navy guys. My brother was a Navy lifer and I remember him hinting about secret submarine missions. I could only imagine such things 'till recently! Hey, were those cable samples you guys have wire pairs or optical? It was a little while ago....
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  2. Good idea! Especially considering the recent Nordstream debacle. Just the hundreds of high pressure natural gas pipelines in the American southwest and beyond is a whole saga - then there's the web of petrochemical pipelines it the eastern US, not to mention crude oil conduits all over the world, there must be thousands of miles of them! When I was a kid I got to visit one of those natural gas pumping stations east of LA - there were these giant engines (running on natural gas of course) that would keep these huge pipes pressurized to feed the gas harvested in Texas to LA, San Diego and so on. Noisy place, runs 24/7 of course.... there's a number of them all over the place... somehow they keep those pipelines full year in, year out.... makes one ponder.... what's gonna happen when the gas runs out?
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  3. No one thought too much about those cables until first the news broke a few years ago about how various nations cut into them for intelligence gathering during the Cold war and more recently the Houthis among others have targeted them for various political reasons.... Here in Northern California, Facebook added a cable a couple years ago to increase connectivity with Asia. I suppose the cable carries other traffic besides Facebook - hope so since I don't use FB. ;*[} Fascinating stuff, thank you for researching this - I actually bought a book on undersea cables a few years ago, but it's not up to date. Like that Nordstream pipeline they blew up, those cables are relatively easy to attack, so as you pointed out they can be relatively easily cut - just another vulnerability in our infrastructure one supposes... there's a great book written in the 1980s called "Brittle Power" that discusses such things - still relevant after four decades... Anyone interested can get a free copy as a PDF online.... Cheers.
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