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Within the arteries and the heart of the Internet

Photo: Mauricio Granados. A forest of pipes emerging transatlantic cable in South Florida, bringing all Internet traffic in southern Europe, and Latin America.

The Internet is not made of air. Although surround and saturate as the ether, we can feel, map and photograph because it has veins, nerves, and even a beating heart. Unlike what many imagine, 90% of our emails, videos in YouTube, Amazon and communications transactions state, military and financial NO comes from beyond through a satellite. All that traffic flows at the speed of light between optical fibers, thick strands of hair wrapped in seven layers of protective materials such as snakes crawl underwater to all continents except Antarctica .

Without the water of the oceans, the seabed would be lined with more than a million miles of black wires the size of fire hoses, the arteries of the Internet. You cut some of those cables, and the Internet will go out in Valencia and Palm Beach.

The journey of an e-mail between Europe and America takes 0.0030 of a second. Follow it in slow motion shows the anatomy, challenges, high technology and considerable physical vulnerability of the global computer network that governs our existence. The transatlantic journey begins One morning in Madrid, in the journal VERY INTERESTING, when a publisher sends, to my office in Miami Beach, a short text of 50 bits: Do we have the photos for this story?

for this 4 page article that he published in the January issue of the print edition of VERY INTERESTING, I had exclusive access to the NAP of the Americas Terremark the place where emerging transatlantic submarine cables carry the most traffic between southern Europe and the Americas, and all traffic between the U.S. and Latin America. A strange, beautiful, modern building with no windows with antennas that look like golf balls, in downtown Miami that distributes traffic to the rest of the USA, from their Facebook messages, even those of the White House and State Department. A true Fortaleza Digital.

The note in the journal illustrates the hazardous journey of a few bytes of information between Madrid and Miami Beach, and all the dangers they face, hungry sharks being just one of them. Think about it the next time your message will take a few seconds more.