Anyone who has read of the adventures of Captain Nemo in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, can only have been left with a sense of wonderment as to the mysteries of the deep. The journey to an incredible underwater forest, a visit to the lost city of Atlantis and a ferocious fight with a giant squid are all memorable sequences in the novel.  It has been 141 years since the book was first published. But despite technological advances in many walks of life, humankind knows little about the oceans. National Geographic estimates we have mapped only 2 or 3 per cent of the seabed.  This grim thought has not stopped private companies such as Hawkes Ocean Technologies from designing submarines that will journey into the deep. Who knows what they will discover as they try to create a new industry of deep-sea mining. However, one thing is certain. As they dive deeper they will pass by the nervous system of the internet – submarine cables with fibre optics at their core.

There are tens of thousands of kilometres of submarine cables meshed across the planet, serving more than 95 per cent of the world's internet and telephone traffic. It is mainly these cables that connect us to data and people. A connection to the internet may start as wireless but become a wired signal once it reaches a base station, continuing on a submarine cable.