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Comment by kyriakos | Hacker News Reader

Too many "accidents" lately. Trying hard not to be a conspiracy theorist since cables were being cut prior Ukrainian war but we've been seeing cables being cut off and ships being sunk more frequently than usual (or maybe now they are just being reported more). Will we ever know?

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Unlike previously cut cables, which were mostly communication fiber cables, this particular one is a power cable and during the cut it was delivering 650MW at 450kV [1] so almost 1450A of current. If it was cut by accident by an anchor I could imagine achor being damaged due to underwater plasma in the arc. In general this cable should also be of quite some diameter. It should be made of thick copper wires (delivering 1450A over 145km) and plenty of dielectric isolation (to separate high voltage of 450kV), the ship would be slowed down or turned if it was accidentally draging this cable behind.

Edit: P.S. Googling for some more details I found some pictures [2] from the installation of Estlink 2 and it doesn’t look that thick, but still it is solid metal with rigid plastic insulations.

1. https://www.4coffshore.com/news/vital-eastlink-2-energy-link...

2. https://group.merko.ee/en/project/installation-of-estlink-2-...

According to an interview with people from the company that owned this particular cable (from Swedish media SVT) these things happen by accident sometimes, they said a couple of times per decade. They themselves did not think this was an accident.

Who did they think did it?

Well in this time its most likely russia.

> (or maybe now they are just being reported more). Will we ever know?

If you don't have statistics on this then there is no reason reason to assume that there is anything unusual going on (although, obviously, in wartime we probably should check vs. the base rate). Cables fail all the time and the reporting is fairly muted. It is quite hard to break into international news even with a major multi-faceted debacle like the Basslink cable failure back in '16 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Tasmanian_energy_crisis.

My completely unfounded pet conspiracy theory is that China or Russia gained control of the company that owns the fibre repair ship.

Cut fibres one at a time, and the victim will pay you to insert a listening device into their fibre.

If you simply cut the fibre with a submarine, they might get suspicious.

If you’re repairing an “accidental” cut everyone expects the outage. They’ll investigate the cut, not the repair.

This was a power cable...

Similarly, you could insert a device that can instantly sever the cable on command, such as a specific acoustic pattern.

In case of war, simply flood the area with an encoded sonar ping and a bunch of links all get cut at the same time.

Can’t you simply encrypt all traffic across the cable at each end point? I’d be surprised if that wasn’t common practice these days. And if wasn’t common practice when these cables were deployed, seems like it would be possible to retrofit.

Not an accident. A Chinese vessel did this.

The current prime suspect is flagged in Cook Islands and registered owner is in UAE. Currently anchored off Finnish coast with a Coast Guard escort.

True, there was a Chinese ship nearby but its path crossed the cable several minutes earlier.

Would be interesting to know how much the anchor hangs to the back when it cut the cable, and whether it was the chain or the anchor itself.

At this point it seems pretty likely that several of these cable cuts are intentional. Sometimes it's ok to entertain conspiracy theories, a significant number of theorized incidents do turn out to be actual conspiracies.

It's been confirmed for months already. We even know which ship damaged the previous ones (and how they lowered the anchor just before the cables and rised it after damaging the cables).

It's not a conspiracy theory when you have evidence and mainstream consensus.

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