Reykjavík Grapevine - Mar 2023, Page 8

8 The Reykjavík
Grapevine 2/23
Best before:
March 2, 2023
It’s something out of a Hollywood
blockbuster, or at least a symptom
of some global crisis more central to
the plot — be it zombie apocalypse,
an alien invasion, or a cataclysmic
global weather event. A world without
internet. Have you ever really thought
about how much of your daily life
hinges on data connectivity and
high-speed internet? Your apps and
email, banking and shopping, even the
light bulbs and other features of your
modern smart home. Our lives are
run by those little glass fibre cables
connecting nearly every home and
workplace in the world like the web of
the monstrous Djieien.
Some 12 million Canadians got a
taste of the disconnected life when,
on July 8, 2022, telecommunications
provider Rogers Communications
experienced a major service outage.
Home internet was down, mobile
users couldn’t call emergency services,
and the country’s major interbank
network facilitating payments and
money transfers ceased to exist. It
was a day-long reckoning and it only
affected roughly 25% of the country.
How would that situation play out
on an island? How would that situa-
tion play out in Iceland?
Trouble down under
It was in September 2022, two months
after that brief outage in Canada and
seven months into Russia’s war on
Ukraine, that the news of increased
submarine activity around western
infrastructure was making interna-
tional headlines. As Moscow and Euro-
pean governments exchanged barbs
about who was responsible for soaring
oil prices and the slowed westward
flow of Russian natural gas, there was
a rupture in a pipeline running along
the Baltic seabed. Then another and
another and another.
Four ruptures were reported in the
Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines carrying
natural gas from Russia to Germany.
Two of the damaged areas lay within
Denmark’s exclusive economic zone
and two in Sweden’s. All four, a Swed-
ish investigative team concluded in
November, were the result of “gross
sabotage.”
“Analysis that has now been carried
out shows traces of explosives on
several of the objects that were recov-
ered” Mats Ljungqvist, the prosecu-
tor leading the investigation, said
in a Nov. 18 press briefing that was
reported on by The Guardian.
But what does this have to do with
Iceland? We revel in our abundant
geothermal energy, so those gas
pipelines aren’t coming our way. But
pipelines aren’t the only valuable
pieces of infrastructure running along
the bottom of the ocean.
In addition to increased NATO
focus on the security of natural gas
infrastructure, Russia’s global posture
over the past years has seen the atten-
tion of western governments turn
to the security of their submarine
telecommunications cables. The
globe-spanning network of more
than 420 submarine communications
cables measure more than 1.3 million
kilometres and carry more than 90%
of the world's internet traffic.
In Iceland, it’s 100%.
“I’M NOT GOING
TO SUGAR COAT IT
AND CLAIM THERE'S
A PLAN IN PLACE.”
ICELAND DIS– CONNECTED
There’s a lot riding on our submarine cables — what if they went bust?
Words:
Catharine Fulton
Images:
Kosmonatka