Lapland’s reindeer herders face plenty of problems, but getting a mobile phone signal is apparently not one of them.

“I remember going across Northern Finland on an educational program with a professor who gives remote classes on reindeer herding,” says Mia Bennett, an associate professor at the University of Washington and an expert on Arctic infrastructure.

“She would go out on the tundra, connect to 5G, and zoom in with her phone to show her students back in Alaska what she was doing. Connectivity in most of Northern Scandinavia is pretty good – I spoke to another reindeer herder at a workshop who was able to pull up Snapchat to chat to the other herders and see what they were up to.”

Reliable 5G and social media access may be a small consolation for the herders battling against the growing industrialization of the Arctic Circle and the impact logging and deforestation have had on the land they use to graze their animals. But it does reflect the fact that virtual infrastructure in many parts of the Far North is actually in good shape.

But despite the presence of 5G in one of the Earth’s most remote locations, fiber connections in the region are much rarer. Subsea Internet cables, which play a vital role in connecting the world, are few and far between in the oceans of the Arctic Circle, with climatic and geopolitical factors limiting their development.

The prize for anyone who can successfully operate a cable in the Arctic is significant, though, with the region potentially able to provide a shortcut to connect the US, Europe, and Asia, relieving pressure on other, oversubscribed, routes.

A new consortium is taking up the challenge with an ambitious plan to lay a cable, Polar Connect, right through the North Pole itself. This is easier said than done, though, with significant technological and environmental barriers to overcome if the project is to become a reality.

This feature appeared in Issue 55 of the DCD Magazine. Read it for free today.

A brief history of cables in the Arctic

The Arctic Circle is characterized as the geographical area where the sun does not rise all day on the Northern Hemisphere’s winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. It takes in areas of countries including the US, Canada, Russia, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and even a small part of Iceland. Greenland, the world’s largest island and a territory of Denmark, sits almost entirely within its borders.

Despite covering an area of some 20 million sq km (7.7 million sq mi), most of which is occupied by ocean, the Arctic Circle is an almost entirely subsea cable-free zone. Per Submarine Cable Map, the only cables traversing the seas of the far north currently are Russia’s domestic Polar Express cable, the first section of which was completed in 2022, and the Svalbard cable system, a 1,400km (~840 mile) link that connects the island of Svalbard, the world’s northernmost civilian settlement, with the Norwegian mainland.

Enterprising engineers have been trying to lay a larger network of cables around the Arctic, utilizing the Northern Sea Route, since the 1990s, says Howard Kidorf, managing partner at Pioneer Consulting, a firm that advises its clients on the planning and implementation of undersea cables. “I remember a project called Polarnet, which was originally supposed to start construction in 2002,” Kidorf says. “It was a vision to connect Europe, Asia, and the US.”

Polarnet was a Russian-owned company, and seemed to be making progress towards its goal of linking East and West when, in 2012, it signed a contract with US cable vendor Tyco (now Subcom) to construct the Russian Optical Trans-Arctic Submarine Cable System, or ROTACS. But work on the project was put on hold when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, and it was eventually canceled.

Attempts were made to revive the ROTACS route in 2015 via Arctic Connect, a project led by Finland which would have seen a 13,800km (8,575 mi) cable laid connecting the Nordic nation and Japan via the Northern Sea Route. This would have been the shortest cable linking Europe with Asia, and Finnish telco Cinia joined forces with Russian telecoms firm MegaFon to deliver the project, which was due to be up and running in 2021/22. However, sanctions imposed on Russia after it waged war on Ukraine, plus spiraling costs, saw Arctic Connect sink without a trace.

The Russians instead pursued Polar Express, which conjures images of a cosy Christmas tale, but is in fact a state-funded cable connecting different parts of Russia via the Arctic Ocean. The first section, linking Teriberka and Amderma, was launched in October 2022, with a second section due to come online in 2025. For obvious reasons, Polar Express is not connected to any global telecoms networks.

Elsewhere, Alaskan fiber company Quintillion proposed a northern cable from London to Tokyo via the US state, and even built part of the link, with a subsea cable in the Arctic Sea running from Alaska’s Nome to Prudhoe Bay. But plans for a more ambitious network collapsed in spectacular fashion when Quintillion CEO Elizabeth Pierce was sentenced to 60 months in jail for defrauding investors out of more than $270 million. Pierce was convicted in 2019 after being found guilty of fabricating future revenue contracts to convince investors to back the scheme.

“Quintillion has not connected the big markets, so you might look on that project as a failure, but in many ways it serves as a useful proof of concept,” Kidorf says. “It shows that you can lay and service cables in Arctic waters, so it’s a step in the right direction.”

While it may seem like all attempts to drop cables in the Arctic Ocean are cursed, enthusiasm about the region’s potential as a future fiber route remains high. There are two practical reasons for this, Kidorf says. One is that the region itself is increasingly busy with shipping traffic and industrial activity as global warming causes the polar ice cap to recede. The other is that it could open up a faster way to connect Europe with Asia and the US, avoiding the crowded and problematic routes through the Middle East.

“When the northern passages started opening, more ships started to traverse those routes,” Kidorf says. “Beyond that, there was already a need for connectivity because there oil and gas facilities on the northern coast of Alaska, First Nations on Canada’s coast and many extractive and military facilities on Russia’s.

“There are also security concerns to consider – the US, Canada, and Russia have always had radar posts in the north, and Russia also has its submarine fleet anchored there.”

As the Arctic ice thaws, things are also hotting up further south in the Red Sea, through which 90 percent of all Internet traffic between Europe and Asia flows. “All the cables available right now between Europe and Asia are expensive,” Kidorf explains. “They wiggle through the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and one of the motivations for setting up new routes is to avoid the Egypt bottleneck.”

Not only is the route through the Middle East crowded, but it comes with considerable peril. DCD has previously reported on the threat posed by Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have declared they will sabotage cables as part of the ongoing conflict in the African nation. Attacks on ships in the region could also cause indirect issues for the 15 cables that run adjacent to Yemeni waters, with a stray anchor capable of causing an outage that can last for weeks at a time.

Connecting the dots

The latest attempt at laying an Arctic cable is Polar Connect – a project with similar ambitions (and a confusingly similar name) to its predecessors, but one that is taking a slightly different direction.

It intends to lay a cable directly through the polar ice sheet, passing west of the geographical North Pole. The route would run from Sweden via Norway and Svalbard through the North Pole to Japan, South Korea, and the Asia-Pacific region via the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia, with landing points in the US, too. The 10,000km cable will pass under some 2,000km of thick ice, with a target launch date of 2030.

Polar Connect is being planned by NORDUnet, the Nordic regional research and education network serving academics in Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland.

Erik-Jan Bos, senior advisor at NORDUnet, is overseeing the project, and says it is designed to enable more efficient and resilient data sharing between Europe and the rest of the world.

It is hoped this will help bolster Europe’s R&D efforts and the continent’s economy. On a political level, Bos says there is buy-in at both ends of the route. “Japan and South Korea are definitely interested because we need a direct path from Europe to Asia for digital sovereignty and autonomy reasons,” he says.

Bos says Polar Connect was first conceived a decade ago under the name Borealis, but was considered infeasible at the time. NORDUnet decided to revisit the idea after the other Arctic cable projects sunk, and has spent the last 18 months carrying out studies to determine whether they can make their plan a reality.

So far, the answer seems to be… maybe. A Northern EU Gateways project report from the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat (SPRS) looking into the plans suggests deployment of Polar Connect will require three ships; two heavy icebreakers (at Polar Class 2) and an ice-strengthened cable laying ship. “We need the two icebreakers so that the cable-laying ship can go about its business safely,” Bos says.

Icebreakers are required because of the sheer thickness of the ice that Polar Connect intends to slice through. Some arctic icebergs reach the ocean floor, the SPRS report says: “Ice conditions in this area are among the toughest in the world,” it notes. While fresh ice can be relatively easy to cut, multi-year ice, which has thawed and refrozen several times, can be harder than concrete, the report says.

The problem is, the ships needed by Polar Connect for this sizeable task do not all exist yet. When it comes to icebreakers, the Swedish Government currently owns a vessel, the Oden, that would be suitable for assisting a cable-laying ship in the Arctic. It is planning to commission a second imminently, known as the Swedish Heavy Polar Research Vessel (SHPRV), which it hopes to receive by 2028. A third icebreaker may even be needed as a backup, the Northern Gateways report says.

At present, there is also no cable-laying ship suitable for the extreme conditions of Arctic waters. The report suggests converting an existing icebreaker, as this could be “significantly more cost-efficient” than building a new ship. Finnish crafts Fennica and Nordica have been identified as possible candidates for conversion. The SPRS report explains that in the cable laying operation, the SHPRV would lead the way, performing reconnaissance and initial cutting of the ice. The Odin would follow, ensuring the way was clear for the cable-laying ship, which would travel at the back of the convoy.

How this complicated-sounding operation will be paid for remains to be seen, but the European Union is certainly throwing its weight behind Polar Connect, and in December 2024, announced it had awarded the project €4 million ($4.22m) to carry out mapping of the seabed in the Arctic Ocean.

This is something, Bos says, that has never been done before on the required scale. “All the oceans in the world have been mapped in detail apart from the Arctic,” he says. “It remains largely unknown because it’s extremely difficult to do. We are planning to go there on expeditions over the next two years and collect bathymetry information.”

Bathymetry information is that relating to the depth of an ocean, and thanks to the EU funding, the Polar Connect team will have access to the Oden to carry out its mission. Ieva Muraškienė, strategy, and policy officer at NORDUnet, says the bathymetry detail will be key to finalizing the route for Polar Connect.

“It’s extremely important to get this data to have an understanding of where the safe path for the cable is,” Muraškienė says. “We already have some information about ridges and seismic activity, and there’s a whole continent underwater, which is relatively safe because it’s flat. But there might also be things like mountain slopes where you don’t really want to be putting a cable.”

Russian roulette

While the Polar Connect team grapples with the physical challenges of laying cables through one of the most remote and unknown parts of the world, it will also be mindful of the geopolitical situation in the region.

Russia’s status as an international pariah has put the kybosh on many pan-Arctic schemes, the University of Washington’s Bennett says. “There’s been a lot of excitement around infrastructure projects in the Arctic, driven by climate change making the region more accessible,” she says. “In the early 2010s, things like roads and pipelines came to fruition, and Russia made significant investments.”

But, she says, a lot of projects fell through, partly because of cost overruns making the Arctic unviable, but also because “Russia becoming separated made things more challenging and volatile.”

Mathieu Boulègue concurs. A researcher on Eurasian security and defense issues, and a visiting scholar at New York University, Boulègue recently authored a paper entitled Arctic seabed warfare against data cables: Risks and impact for US critical undersea infrastructure, and says the current situation in the region is something of a return to normality.

“In the 1990s, Gorbachev floated the Murmansk Initiative, which aimed to promote Arctic exceptionalism and cooperation,” Boulègue says. “After that, we had what now looks like a 20-year ‘lull’ of low tension, but we are back in an era of operating in a confrontational geopolitical environment.”

No longer a reliable partner for other countries in the Arctic region, Russia now squats as a hostile state next to Finland, and Polar Connect will pass close to its waters. This is a potential problem because the Kremlin – and its allies in China – have shown they are not averse to interfering with subsea infrastructure as a way of disrupting their enemies in the West.

In November 2024 two Internet cables in the Baltic Sea were severed by a Chinese vessel, which investigators believe set out to deliberately cause damage. The Yi Peng 3, which had a Chinese captain and at least one Russian crew member, sailed over both the C-Lion1 Helsinki-Rostock cable and the BCS East-West link cable between Lithuania and Sweden around the time they were cut. Russia has denied any involvement, and such incidents can happen accidentally, but other damage to cables in the region has aroused suspicion, notably in 2022 when the Svalbard cable was hit and had to be repaired. Investigators said at the time the cause was likely “human-made but unintentional.”

“We all know that Russia is up to no good when it comes to disrupting critical underwater infrastructure as part of gray zone operations,” Boulègue says. “They consider themselves to be in a form of conflict with the West. It’s really low-intensity, simmering, warfare, and this kind of sub-threshold operation is what Russia knows best.”

Boulègue argues that Russia is likely to continue targeting subsea cables because the pushback from Nato nations has, so far, been limited. “They disrespect us so much that they think it’s ok to wage subsea warfare because the deterrents have been minimal,” he says. “This is an area where they perceive they are not vulnerable.”

What does this mean for Polar Connect? “There’s always going to be a risk of attack,” Boulègue says. “They won’t be able to protect the entire length of the cable, so they will need to look at choke points around landing stations, or areas where the topography of the seabed means the cable is more vulnerable to being attacked.”

More generally, he believes a coordinated response is required from the Nato nations, both in terms of using more monitoring technology to detect and respond to incidents quickly, and in calling out vessels that are spotted behaving unusually near cable routes. “If there is a 200,000-ton Chinese freighter doing weird movements near a cable route, then we need to say so publicly,” he says.

“We need to be bold, and I think we are learning from the cybersecurity world about this. Twenty years ago, we were still on training wheels when it came to the legal and technical attribution of cyberattacks, but now governments and industry leaders are not afraid to say if they think an attack is state-sponsored. We need to hear similar rebukes about cable attacks.”

Bringing Polar Connect to life

There’s plenty of work to do before Polar Connect reaches the stage where it needs to worry about being sabotaged by a massive Russian anchor.

Pioneer Consulting’s Kidorf says laying and maintaining cables in Arctic waters is likely to be fraught with difficulties, the biggest of which – in a very literal sense – is ice scour, where moving icebergs scrape the bottom of the ocean floor.

“Icebergs reach a long way down, and if there’s a cable there, they don’t really care,” he says. “They’ll just rip it up.”

Sea ice, the kind that occurs on the surface of the ocean as the water freezes, is also likely to be problematic for laying and maintaining cables, Kidorf says. He explains: “You can probably dodge a bullet during installation by building it during the half of the year when there isn’t any ice, but that’s going to be costly for a big project. Navigating weather windows is something the subsea cable industry is used to – you don’t want to be in the Northern Atlantic in the middle of winter, either.”

There’s less flexibility when it comes to maintenance. Kidorf says: “If your cable gets cut in the wrong time of year, what are you going to do? Are you just going to have an icebreaker on standby? That’s still an open issue.”

Polar Connect believes that the laying of the cable could take place over 80 days during the Arctic summer, in August and September, when the ice has receded. That said, the SPRS report notes that this may prove unrealistic when the time comes. “One must bear in mind that nature rules in this part of the world,” it says. “What seems to be possible one year can be totally impossible the next.”

The laying process is expected to cost some $142.5-237.5 million, but the overall bill for the project is likely to be far higher, Kidorf says. “The market for these cables is totally unproven,” he says. “All the proposals so far have been priced in the region of $600 million – $1.2 billion, and that’s a lot of money to put down for an unproven market. Of course, this is often the case with virgin markets, but you need investors with a healthy appetite for risk.”

Polar Connect will also have to lay its cables without doing further damage to an environment already under severe stress. The Arctic faces multiple threats from climate change, with global warming shrinking the size of the summer ice cap by 13 percent each decade, according to figures from the World Wildlife Fund. Sea levels are rising, permafrost is thawing, and extreme and unexpected weather events like wildfires are becoming more commonplace.

Against this backdrop, is building more infrastructure in the Arctic a wise idea? Kidorf believes the cables can be laid without doing too much additional damage. “The cables themselves don’t pose much risk because they’re only the size of your thumb,” he says. “The bigger risk is what it does to further open up the polar region. The more we facilitate the oil and gas industry and the extractive industries in general – there’s also a lot of mining going on in northern Russia – the more land we can lay waste to.”

The wider impact of the project is also a cause for concern for Bennett, who says that communities in the Arctic are still “paying the price” for botched infrastructure projects of the past. She says: “I think having more infrastructure projects in the Arctic is a net negative for the environment. It’s a very sensitive ecosystem, and the Arctic amplification effect feedback loops causes climatic factors to impact elsewhere.”

The Arctic amplification effect refers to the fact that the polar region is warming two or three times faster than other areas. And because the Arctic plays such a vital role cooling the rest of the planet, a feedback loop is created which worsens climate change elsewhere.

Polar Connect’s Bos believes the project can be beneficial to the environment thanks to sensors that will be placed on the cable. The plan is to install two types of sensor, one to monitor the cable for breaks and other damage, and another that can assist scientists. “Not only is bathymetry information about the Arctic Ocean missing, but scientists lack many other types of data that could help them study climate change,” he says. “The cable can help provide that.”

Attaching sensors to subsea cables is something that is often talked about within the industry but has yet to become a reality. Bos says products are already on the market that can be incorporated into cables, citing a range of sensors from Alcatel Submarine Networks that can deliver “a constant stream of data” on things like water temperature and salinity. “Because we have six years until deployment, we’re talking to sensor manufacturers about what else might be possible,” he says. “We’re exploring a lot of different options.”

Time will tell whether Polar Connect succeeds, and whether the reality of the cable route matches the current vision of Bos and his team. But Pioneer Consulting’s Kidorf says, regardless of the fate of the project, it is only a matter of time before someone makes a cable connection through the Arctic Circle. “I think it will inevitably happen at some point,” he says. “The potential benefits are there; it just remains to be seen if the benefits will outweigh the costs.”

This feature appeared in Issue 55 of the DCD Magazine. Read it for free today.