Seriously. From the BBC:
“We’ve lost three out of four lines. If the fourth cable breaks, we’re looking at a total blackout in the Middle East,” said Mr Wright.
“These three circuits account for 90% of the traffic and we’re going to see more international phone calls dropping and a huge degradation in the quality of local internet,” he added.
And before you all jump to conclusions, these were undersea cables and the current favorite culprit is seismic activity.
Has it just gotten more coverage lately, or is this an issue we’ve had for a while? I mean, I’m sure there’s only so much you can do to make predictions, but don’t they survey for fault lines before they put these down? To ask your marine biologist side (although perhaps its a better question for an oceanographer?) I thought there were fairly decent or least notionally useful maps of some sizeable swaths of the sea bottom at this point, thanks to all the lovely tech we have nowadays…I wonder if when they first laid down telegraphy wires this sort of thing came up….
I’m a chemist, not a biologist, though neither helps a lot.
I’m sure they do have good maps of the sea floor and potential seismic zones, but cables have to go from A to B and sometimes you have have no choice. Santorini is around there somewhere.
The smart thing to do would be to have alternate routes – e.g. Spain to North Africa and around the south of the Med.
Sorry to make that mistake (I knew you used to do something marine, I remembered you writing about it)! And I do wonder why there aren’t better backups, although I imagine that has to do with installation cost…
FYI, the current favored culprit is a ship’s anchor.