A worthwhile insight into how reliant we are on subsea cables and pipelines.
The first transoceanic cable ~ you may be surprised to read ~ was installed while Queen Victoria was early on in her reign in 1858, following successful installations in the English Channel.
Now a global network delivers oil, gas, electricity and data until such time as it might not, depending on where and when war breaks out in Europe... again. And here's the thing: the UK relies on such cables for somewhere between 95% and 99% of what it uses on the internet.
Upon which, you might have noticed, we rely for just about every aspect of modern life. It's been going on for some time, not just to disrupt everyday living but also it would seem for the value of the scrap metal involved ~ high-voltage DC cables are as thick as your arm.
Increasingly communication cables are buried when laid at shallower depths such as the continental shelf, and duplicated for seamless operation. Beside any number of 'fishing' and 'research' vessels able to drag anchors at such depths in ways more careless than expected, increasingly superpowers are building uncrewed surface and subsea vessels on a tiny scale able to operate at greater depths altogether; echoing developments in the atmosphere above, and beyond in space.
There's likely then to be calls for (a) inexpensive (b) small (c) fast (d) independent watercraft to combat threats both on and beneath the surface, and that rather rules out petrol-powered types in many roles, for unlike electrical craft they are unable to loiter in the sunshine in order to replenish their power supplies.
War's likely to be ~ as they sing in Disneyland ~ a small small small small world.
The ecological damage caused by the current employment of drones is inestimable and the prize for the greatest yet probably goes to Ukraine for monumental release of methane from the Nord 2 pipeline supplying Europe... and for which one among their number is to appear in court in Germany, which largely owned the facility.
