EARTH · STORYMAP
The Cables That Carry the Internet
Almost everything you do online leaves your continent through a glass thread on the seabed, about as thick as a garden hose. Scroll, and the map follows those cables — through the chokepoint every Europe-to-Asia route squeezes into, to the volcano that cut a country off for five weeks, to the fishing boats that break them roughly every other day.
7 STOPS · SCROLL TO TRAVEL · UPDATED 2026-07-22
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About this data
Every figure in this story carries its source and the date it refers to, printed beside it. The map layers are the same live feeds the main globe uses: Satellite ground (Esri World Imagery, not live) — High-resolution imagery of the surface. Imagery, not a live camera — no LIVE tag. · Submarine cables (TeleGeography, not live) — The undersea fibre-optic cables and their landing points. Cable routes change over months, not minutes. Nothing on the map is drawn by hand: where a feed has nothing to show, the layer stays empty rather than being filled in.
Sources: TeleGeography Submarine Cable FAQs · TeleGeography — mythbusting the 99% figure · International Cable Protection Committee · Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program — Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai. Credits shown on the map itself: Esri World Imagery · TeleGeography.