Sailing the wired seas

THE first use the modern world made of the oceans’ depths was to run telegraph cables across them. That opened up a new era of intercontinental communication and spurred a new scientific interest in the abyss. Both enterprises have prospered: single cables now carry as much as 160 terabits across the Atlantic every second; oceanographers have mapped and drilled into the ocean floor around the world. But they have not come together. It is now very easy to get vast amounts of data from one side of an ocean to another; but it is hard to get even modest amounts of data out from the ocean itself. A new infrastructure is needed to enable sensors at sea to transfer their data back to land.