The Politics of a Subsea Data Cable Link to Antarctica

Antarctica is the only continent without a fiber-optic connection.

The technology required to get one there is available, but the creation of such infrastructure raises geopolitical questions, including its potential military use, say researchers from Germany.

The US National Science Foundation has plans to build a subsea data cable link from New Zealand or Australia to its McMurdo research base in Antarctica. There’s been no update on the project under the current administration, and research funding has been cut to the Foundation, perhaps casting the plan in doubt.

There’s another project in the planning stages for a link from Chile to King George Island, the Antarctic region with the highest density of research stations, which is being developed through funding from Multilateral Cooperation Center for Development Financing and CAF Development Bank of Latin American and the Caribbean.

These cables would facilitate greater research data transfer that is not reliant on satellite communications.

As the Southern Ocean, including the climate-critical Antarctic Circumpolar Current, remains less researched than other bodies of water, a sensor-equipped cable would also provide a valuable platform for sustained seafloor observations and scientific data generation.

However, such cables could be significant beyond just providing data link to further polar science, as the sensors could also monitor shipping and subsea vehicle activity. This capability would enable tracking of naval vessels that do not need to disclose their position through AIS.

Owned by one nation, they could be used to control or exclude the transfer of data to and from other nations.

These potential uses could be perceived as militarization and therefore contrary to the unique governance of Antarctica. Article 1 of the Antarctic Treaty states: Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only.

“Given the explicit connections to Five Eyes intelligence partner networks and the indirect association with military-linked infrastructure in other polar regions, even seemingly neutral cable infrastructure may be perceived as strategically exclusionary,” said the researchers.

The attempted assertion of influence over Greenland by the Trump administration and the suspected acts of sabotage against the Svalbard cable underline the strategic significance of polar infrastructure.

If approached inclusively, a subsea data cable to Antarctica could serve as a model for cooperative digital development. “Proposals for more, distributed landings, redundant cable designs, though costly and environmentally more impactful, may become more politically and technically attractive over time. Once established, an Antarctic cable could be the starting point to a more inclusive system structure, for example an Antarctic ring system, which would enable all coastal research stations to be connected. Circular systems with festoon landings also bear the advantage of being inherently redundant.”

If not approached this way, it may become another fault line in an increasingly fragmented international system. “Either way, these projects are not just about connecting Antarctica to the internet – they are about defining how states govern digital infrastructures in spaces beyond sovereignty, in the material internet’s last frontier.”

The study was conducted by researchers from the Technical University of Darmstadt and the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. It is published in Telematics and Informatics Reports.