Undersea cable to Antarctica through Drake Passage is viable, researchers find — 1,600km route to Chile could spell an end to research data leaving in ‘suitcases full of hard drives’
A fiber-optic cable strung across the Drake Passage could pull Antarctica’s research bases off satellite links and hard-drive shipments and onto the global network after Chile’s finalized feasibility study concluded last week that the crossing is technically viable. Salience Consulting and Pioneer Consulting ran the study for telecom regulator Subtel, and development bank CAF financed it, with partial support from the China-initiated MCDF Finance Facility. It recommends an instrumented cable carrying a dedicated fiber pair to each Antarctic landing, naming two Chinese firms among the six suppliers Subtel canvassed. Antarctic research data still leaves the continent physically, on hard drives ferried out by ship and plane “in suitcases full of hard drives,” said Juan Pablo, a team leader in the pre-feasibility study.
The study weighs a minimum configuration serving three facility groups around King George Island and the northern Antarctic Peninsula against an optimal configuration with nine Antarctic landing points, an option that Reports 2 and 3 recommend. The nine-landing version would connect research bases run by Chile, Argentina, Brazil, the United States, and the United Kingdom, all fed from landings at Punta Arenas and Puerto Williams in southern Chile and routed across the Drake Passage. Reporting from The Maritime Executive puts the minimum build near $370 million and the optimal build at roughly $620 million.
The study lists four features that separate the project from a commercial cable: Drake Passage weather, ice scour at the Antarctic landings, installation methods uncommon in Antarctica, and a plan to embed SMART sensors that measure ocean-bottom temperature, pressure, and seismic acceleration for climate and tsunami monitoring.
Each Antarctic landing would get a dedicated fiber pair rated at 15 to 30 Tbit/s through space-division multiplexing, with each base free to pick its own transmission equipment. To clear ice scour to about 340 meters of depth, the design calls for horizontal directional drilling at the Antarctic landfalls and double-armored cable, with installation spread across three austral summers inside the December-to-January weather window.
Subtel’s request for information went to Alcatel Submarine Networks of France, Japan’s NEC, U.S.-based SubCom, the UK’s Xtera, and two Chinese firms, HMN Technologies and FibreHome. HMN Technologies is the former Huawei Marine Networks, sold to Hengtong after U.S. sanctions and placed on the Commerce Department’s Entity List in 2020, and Washington has spent years working to keep it off Pacific cable routes. The study acknowledges this, listing the geopolitics of project financing and procurement restrictions among its critical risks and recommending “neutrality by design,” dark fiber, and user-controlled transmission gear so no operator can read another’s traffic.
As for financing, that also carries a Chinese link through the MCDF Finance Facility, a Beijing-based mechanism tied to the Belt and Road Initiative. That backdrop runs into a Western push to strip Chinese firms and money out of subsea cable infrastructure on security grounds, the same pressure reshaping projects such as a Black Sea cable routed to bypass Russia.
The study stops short of recommending construction, calling instead for a phased path that resolves the financing and political questions before the expensive supply contracts are signed. Chile has sent the reports to its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is expected to bring them to the country’s Antarctic Policy Council, and any build would need agreement from the other Antarctic states whose bases sit on the optimal route.
