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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> about to be decommissioned.

I presume this means disconnected and forgotten about on the sea floor. Or do they actually do anything to pull them up? I imagine pulling an old cable might be very difficult but I don't like things just being left for the sea to deal with. There is far to much trash on the seafloor already.

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I would think pulling up a cable would be detrimental to any ecosystem that built on and around the cable. I would not be surprised to learn that ecosystems were affected negatively when the cables were laid, too, so I think we probably want to limit damage by letting them lie there.

Depends on what kinds of substances are present there, that will leach out over time.

Steel, rubber, and glass? Doesn't seem so bad.

Future archaeologists may find "the fossilised remains of continent spanning worms!".

There is no plastic in the cable?

If you are worried about plastic in the ocean I have some really bad news.

This attitude continues to perplex me. "There's already plastic in the ocean" is not a justification for adding more plastic to the ocean.

If you're optimizing for the minimum amount of plastic in the ocean, not building undersea cables is not going to be very effective.

You see, the question you're implying with that answer is different from the original one posed: from "do we put this cable down or not?" to "what else could we do with our time and energy?"

You're not wrong, but in the context of this conversation it is an incorrect assessment.

Typically they're just left there. But every once in a while someone will decide it makes sense to acquire the cable for cheap, pull it up, and re-use it somewhere else that doesn't have high bandwidth requirements but would still benefit from getting subsea connectivity. Seen this for Pacific and some Caribbean islands.

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