The Grace Hopper subsea cable transmits internet traffic across the Atlantic

The 500 subsea cables that run the internet

Subsea cables carry the majority of data sent across the globe on the internet. An estimated 552 such cables—with more in development—lay on the ocean floor, their thickness similar to a garden hose, made up of optic fibers covered in copper.

Learn about the construction of the undersea fiber optic cables carrying internet data

Over 750,000 miles of fiber-optic cables run along the seafloor, serving as a freeway for the Internet's data. Despite subsea cable projects costing hundreds of millions of dollars, depending on the length of the cable, it remains the fastest and most cost-effective way to send information.

Explore a searchable map of underwater cables carrying internet traffic worldwide

The Submarine Cable Map provides users with data from TeleGeography's Transport Networks Research Service on individual submarine cables, including cable owners, suppliers, URLs, landing points, lengths, and notes of interest.

Around 380 underwater cables power the Internet across the world.

On July 29, 1858, two steam-powered battleships met in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. There, they connected two ends of a 4,000 kilometer (2,500 mile) long, 1.5 centimeter (0.6 inch) wide cable, linking for the first time the European and North American continents by telegraph.

The transatlantic cable allowed for communications between North America and Europe

It had significant impacts on just about every industry, including finance. Specifically, the transatlantic cable made it so that real-time financial transactions could take place across the Atlantic, and allowed for much faster sharing of information that increased global market accuracy.

Explore a collection of media depicting major milestones from the life of Grace Hopper

The gallery features Hopper's meeting with President Ronald Reagan, her attendance at the groundbreaking of the Grace Murray Hopper Service Center—a Naval data processing facility—and her Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony.

The history of the National Science Foundation Network, a precursor of the internet

Although ARPANET connected various national laboratories and supercomputing facilities by the 1970s to facilitate scientific collaboration, the system was slow and required highly trained operators. The launch of NSFNET in 1986 provided a more flexible and powerful network that went on to connect over 170 academic and research communities and link to its European counterpart, EASInet.

The Channel Tunnel consists of an underwater network of over 200 kilometers in length

The passage beneath the English Channel between England and France includes three tunnels, crossover chambers, emergency passages, and air ducts. Burrowing teams in either country consistently checked their coordinates to ensure they would meet within two centimeters of each other.

View data center electrical demand and fiber optic cable connections across the US

Data center hub construction has prioritized locations with affordable electricity and fiber internet for data transmission, including Loudoun and Prince William Counties in Virginia and Maricopa County in Arizona. As of 2025, Northern Virginia's robust data center infrastructure is estimated to handle about 70% of global internet traffic.

Testing the internet speed of the US's wireless providers

The US ranked 26th in the world for mobile speeds and eigth for fixed broadband speeds during April 2022. See this ranking of mobile and fixed broadband speeds from around the world on a monthly basis.

Explore coral reefs in Google's "street view"

Expanding its mission to map the world, Google Maps partnered with The Catlin Seaview Survey to introduce the first-ever underwater panoramas, making oceanic marvels like the Great Barrier Reef accessible to everyone. With Google Maps, the public...

Learn about the protocols that make navigating the internet possible

While TCP/IP sends data in packets to the correct destination and checks for errors, UDP omits such safety features to speed up data transfer for real-time communication and streaming. Software rules such as HTTP and HTTPS enable the transfer of content on the World Wide Web, while SMTP handles email messages between servers.

Google only sorts and searches a fraction of the overall internet

The "surface web," consisting of billions of public webpages, excludes nonindexed digital content, such as corporate intranets and email inboxes. A deeper layer, called the dark web, is also hidden and requires special software to access.

Google chose Santa Barbara to host its Quantum AI computing project

The project seeks to reduce errors within its quantum computer and integrate 1 million physical qubits (or quantum bits) into the room-sized computer. This powerful device will attempt to solve complex problems in medicine, computing, and more.

COBOL was partly derived from Grace Hopper's FLOW-MATIC programming language

The Common Business-Oriented Language was developed for business data processing, supporting precise decimal calculations and an English-like syntax. Able to work across operating systems and hardware environments, COBOL and its newer versions support 80% of in-person credit card transactions and 95% of all ATM transactions.

Satellite imagery of the massive seaweed blob in the Atlantic

A belt of sargassum seaweed that stretches from the west coast of Africa to the Gulf of Mexico is the largest on record for March.

How the Martha Graham Company experiments with technology

The dance company was the first major group to livestream rehearsals and has collaborated with Google on a version of Graham's "Lamentation" that superimposes past performances on the present-day dancer.

One in five 16th century Spanish ships sank while crossing the Atlantic

Despite the incredibly high rate of catastrophic wrecks, during the Age of Exploration Spanish investors continued to fund voyages. Here, economists break down the incentives that led to increased risk, including short travel seasons and the propensity to overload ships.

Two main types of inflight WiFi connections are air-to-ground and satellite-based

ATG systems rely on aircraft antennae to catch signals from cellphone towers, while the latter uses a network of satellites transmitting data from space. As of 2022, airlines like Delta and United hosted over 1.5 million monthly WiFi sessions.

Reimagining YouTube as cable TV, complete with channel-surfing

The site streams YouTube content as if it were broadcast television, providing the ability to flip through channels and enter videos mid-stream, and you also can't easily skip ahead. The product is designed in part to bring back serendipity to video discovery.

The history and operation of SIGABA, the US counterpart of the Nazi Enigma machine

Developed by the US Army and US Navy, over 10,000 of these machines were deployed by the end of World War II to encrypt messages for the armed forces using three series of rotors. The device would continue to be used until the 1950s, while personal computers were shown to possess enough computing power to crack it by 2021.

NYC's first subway was built largely in secret

In 1870, Alfred Ely Beach secretly tunneled under Broadway in 58 nights, disguising his pneumatic subway as a mail tube to fool Tammany Hall, the corrupt political machine that ran New York City. Nearly half a million New Yorkers rode it before politics, and a stock market crash killed the project.

LIGO is part of the advanced gravitational wave detector network

Like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, Europe's Virgo Gravitational Wave Interferometer and Japan's Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector reflect laser beams down perpendicular tunnels to detect gravitational waves in the patterns created by the recombined waves. Future observatories are expected to contribute to this network, further improving gravitational wave detections.

Indigenous women crafted the integrated circuits for the Apollo Guidance Computer

Applying their blanket-weaving skills, over 1,000 Navajo women in New Mexico were hired to connect circuit components in intricate patterns using a microscope. Outside Boston, "rope mothers" at the Raytheon facility wove the AGC's core memory using threaded metal wires.

Internet sleuths solve secret message on Perseverance rover’s Mars parachute

In 2020, the Perseverance Rover landed on Mars, sending a message for the folks back home on its parachute. It took fewer than six hours for the Internet's collective forces to decode the secret slogan hidden in the parachute's colors and patterns, as well as the geographic coordinates of the earth-bound place where rocketry was perfected.

Stanford built a Google Maps for the Roman Empire, revealing how much it cost to travel in the ancient world

Waves off the coast of Nazaré, Portugal, can reach over 100 feet and are caused by the area's deep underwater canyon geography

The first image of a black hole was captured by creating an Earth-sized virtual observatory from a network of eight radio telescopes.

In 1915, workers recovered a submarine-like vessel from the Chicago River, prompting fears of German espionage

Track the location of the Voyager probes, currently between 13 and 15 billion miles away from Earth.

Electrical grids worldwide must double their power delivery capacity by 2050 to meet surging demand from AI and electric vehicles.

When you complete a CAPTCHA on a website to prove you are human, you may be unknowingly training algorithms for self-driving cars, whose systems require training data to help identify crosswalks, bicycles, and other outdoor objects.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

Explore the history, structure, and species of Australia's Great Barrier Reef with this interactive journey narrated by Sir David Attenborough.

The American Society of Civil Engineers' infrastructure report card gave the US a C in 2025, its highest grade since the project launched in 1998.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

Watch how deep-sea mining equipment collects and processes polymetallic nodules—metal-rich, potato-shaped rocks—from the ocean floor and creates environmentally damaging plumes of sediments.

SpaceX's S-1 or 'prospectus' revealed many previously unknown details about the company, including its unprofitability despite doing $18.7B in revenue in 2025, exactly how many voting shares Elon Musk will have in the company (roughly 85%), and more.

Hear about the 250-year history of the United States Postal Service, complete with some of its strangest deliveries, important innovations, and the figures that made it an American institution.

The US dollar is the most widely circulated currency in the world, and is involved in nearly 90% of global transactions

Astronauts have repaired genetic damage in space using CRISPR—a molecular tool that can make precise changes to DNA and is used in single-celled organisms to attack invasive viruses.

The American cockroach is actually from Africa, an apparent hitchhiker aboard ships carrying enslaved people, with evidence suggesting the bug may have arrived in the New World as early as the 1600s.

Hotels in Cannes, the glamorous city on the French Riviera, hire hawks to ward off seagulls during the city's famous film festival.

Hurricanes, which rely on air consistently spinning in the same direction, cannot cross the equator because air curves in opposite directions north and south of it.

Search a massive database of over 4 decades of clues from the TV quiz show 'Jeopardy!'

Quincy Jones' 'Big Band Bossa Nova' helped introduce bossa nova—a jazz-influenced Brazilian genre—to the US

The Great Salt Lake's distinct dual coloration results from high-salinity organisms that only live in the northern portion and produce a purple protein.

The syncytiotrophoblast is the outer layer of the placenta and the largest human cell, spanning an area about twice that of a king-sized bedsheet.

In preparation for this weekend's Eurovision finale, which is something like the World Cup of pop music, here's a young Céline Dion performing (for Switzerland?) at the 1988 competition.

See how Budweiser's famous Clydesdales spend their days at Warm Springs Ranch, where roughly 70 to 80 of the beer brand's giant horses can be found at any given time.