Shrinking Arctic Ice Affects Map for Internet Cable Connections

Melting Arctic sea ice may open up new routes for subsea internet cables, which carry most international data traffic.

That is reported by Politico.

A new 14,500-km subsea cable in the Arctic, the Far North Fiber, could reroute data traffic away from vulnerable choke points, such as the Red Sea, through which over 90 percent of all Europe-Asia traffic flows.

To avoid the problem of critical data relying on just one path, the Far North Fiber project will link Europe directly to Japan via the Northwest passage in the Arctic, with landing sites in Japan, the United States (Alaska), Canada, Norway, Finland, and Ireland.

This would have been impossible without the rapid shrinking of sea ice in the Arctic, which is warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the world.

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