The Internet Under the Sea

NPR’s Anas Baba is one of the last remaining journalists in Gaza working full-time for an American news organization. A year into the ceasefire, more than 1400 people have been killed in Israeli attacks, nearly 5,000 injured. And those numbers rise nearly every day. What has the ...  Show more

We live in a moment with almost daily reminders of how fragile life on Earth is whether it be from climate change, nuclear weapons or AI. In this episode, we bring you a story from the not-so-distant past when we learned what drove dinosaurs to extinction. And how it might have h ...  Show more

How does the internet get information from across the planet to your house? While many people might guess it's a matter of satellites and synchronous orbits, they'd only be partially correct -- the vast majority of data zipping around online moves through a network of undersea ca ...  Show more

Undersea cables form the backbone of global communication, with over 95% of global internet traffic relying on hundreds of fibre-optic cables criss-crossing the globe. But recent incidents such as disruption to cables in the Baltic Sea have highlighted concerns over their securit ...  Show more

This 2016 episode touches on the establishment of a submarine telegraph cable to connect North America and Europe. It took ingenuity, but more than anything else, it required tenacity. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. 

It was an engineering feat to link England to France via subsea cables. Connecting Europe to America would require even greater innovation. From failed installations to engineering mistakes, we look at what it took to connect two continents separated by the Atlantic ocean. Learn ...  Show more