Undersea microphones developed to protect UK’s £65 billion cables from threats

You can’t see them from space, but a network of critical undersea cables powers the UK.

The wires and pipelines carry over 90% of the nation’s daily internet traffic and are worth £65bn to the economy.

The race is on to protect these lifelines, which are currently ‘naked’ and ‘incredibly vulnerable’ to sabotage from Russia and other states.

WTX can reveal that undersea microphones are being developed to give the British military a leg up in this future battleground and help shield the UK from devastating attacks on its cables.

Experts at defence firm BAE Systems are developing these vibration-detecting sensors for military use, which will attach to cables and catch oncoming threats.

Cables have long been at risk of accidental disruption, such as when ships unwittingly drag their anchor, or when fishermen trawl the seabed.

But now there is little doubt that Putin and other hostile states have their eyes on this critical undersea infrastructure (CUI).

Just last week, Nato forces foiled a Russian subsea sabotage plot, when they chased away ships in Arctic waters training to attack the cables with an undisclosed secret weapon.

Then Defence Secretary John Healey warned in Parliament last year that Russia was ‘gathering intelligence and mapping’ the UK’s cable network.

‘Much of our life as we know it goes through cables,’ says Tim O’Neill,  Subsea Intelligence lead at BAE Systems.

‘There has been a real increase in the threat to this undersea infrastructure. It is no longer just benign accidents.’

Researchers at the defence giant are now working on a way to turn this very vulnerability into a military asset for the UK.

The answer lies in attaching powerful sensors onto the fibre optic cables.

Known as distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), the technology can detect even the faintest of vibrations near the cable, affecting the fibres.

BAE Systems want to revolutionise how these DAS sensors are used so they can ‘turn a cable running for hundreds of kilometres along
the ocean floor into a continuous array of microphones’.

The sensors would be able to detect any vibration on the seabed near the cable, and identify ‘everything from environmental shifts to the movement of vessels and even marine life’.

The sensors are already used widely on land but also on a limited commercial basis under the water.

But BAE want to advance this technology for military purposes.

O’Neill explained how it could work: ‘You will get an alert that something has hit the seabed at this position on the cable.

‘DAS will be able to pick up that anchor dragging far enough away that you can tell the vessel to stop, or if that doesn’t work, you still have time to send out military assets to intercept it.’

The tech is currently in its experimentation phase, with data being fed from a DAS sensor on a cable into BAE’s AI and machine learning programmes.

‘The reality is that this is a state problem,’ O’Neill added.

‘If we can get this into the hands of the UK government to support their activity, trying to counter Russian threats, then we want to be part of that.’

The challenge for experts is not just making sure the tech works, but figuring out how to handle the reams of data it pumps out.

So tools are also being developed which will tools which will identify the signals of interest as they appear and alert the operator.

Defence experts believe the new undersea microphones could mark a ‘small revolution’ in the future of underwater battle.

Alessio Patalano, who specialises in critical undersea infrastructure King’s College’s War Studies Department, believes the data from the sensors will enable military chiefs to better defend the ‘incredibly vulnerable’ cables.

He said: ‘The sensors provide persistent and consistent data on how to understand what’s happening around the cable in a way that was impossible.

‘It makes the seabed slightly more transparent, making it easier to understand where to operate, how to operate, and against whom you are operating.

‘It will also improve the ability to recover from any interference with the cables, because you are going to be faster at identifying where the problem is and the best way to address it.’

The Ministry of Defence has been approached for comment.