Why do sharks like to bite sea cable?

Your cable is broken and your home network is slow. You can no longer access Facebook or your favorite websites. Everyone says the optical cable is broken by a shark, so is it true that sharks bite the cable? And what is the reason shark likes to eat cables? Try to learn through the following article.

At 5:45 am, the AAG submarine cable route continued to have trouble affecting the international internet connection . This is probably no longer a strange story for Vietnamese internet users, when every few months, this transpacific AAG cable route breaks once. There are many reasons for the optical cable to break, such as natural conditions, fishing boats, people, and some of them are caused by shark bites.

Perhaps many people think that shark biting off is just a joke, but in fact there was a video of how a shark is tearing and trying to bite the line of Google's undersea fiber optic cable. . Later, Google had to upgrade its submarine fiber cable with a bulletproof shell with external Kevlar to avoid being cut off by sharks.

Although sharks are not the main reason for the fiber breakage, there is a fact that these cables have a strange attraction to this predator. Scientists have also done research to explain why sharks love to bite fiber optic cables under the seabed.

According to the study, the scientists found the first "optical bite bite " of the first marine fiber optic cable in 1985. They found traces of shark teeth on a cable off the Canary Islands. And since one of the most common causes of cable breakage is the shark bite.

Unlike short fiber optic cables on land or copper, marine optical cables are very long and therefore need a very high voltage to ensure data transmission.It is the large voltage that creates a magnetic field around the length of the cable. Normally around the marine fiber optic cable there will be a magnetic field of about 50 Hz due to the alternating current that powers the internal amplifier.

Marine optical cable has a very high voltage, generating the surrounding magnetic field .

Meanwhile sharks are a predator capable of sensing from the school to catch prey. So they often mistakenly believe that the magnetic field emanating from the prey and attacking the marine fiber cables. When the fiber optic cable is bitten by a shark, it may not break, but it will greatly affect the data transmission capacity.

Because when the sharp teeth of the shark pierce the polyethylene sheath that encapsulates the fiber optic cable, it creates holes that make the sea come into contact with copper pipes and cable cores. The current supplied to the amplifier leaks out, making it impossible to amplify the light signal and interrupt the data transmission.

There are also other opinions that sharks prefer to bite these cables simply because of curiosity. Professor Chris Lowe is a shark researcher at California State University who thinks that sharks often bite sea cables simply because they like it, not because of hunting. 'If you put a piece of plastic with a tube in front of a shark. Surely he will want to grab that piece of plastic not because he thinks it can be eaten ' . It is a natural act that we can see in many animals like dogs and cats when they play around with objects.

Experts around the world have discovered the causes of Vietnam's optical fiber breakage

However, no matter what the reason, the rate of sea-fiber cable broken by shark bites is much lower than that caused by humans.Up to 70% of the undersea optical cable breaks are due to the activities of asexual vessels and cable-breaking, or due to actions intended to cut and steal marine fiber cables to pay for themselves . So we should not blame sharks every time the AAG fiber optic cable goes into trouble like today.