LAYING A CABLE

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 48, 20 November 1926, Page 24

LAYING A CABLE

Out on tho heaving wastes of the grey Atlantic the cable layer Colonia is slowly letting down the new cable that is Io transmit our messages to Now York at the amazing speed cf 500 words a minute

There will be no very great depths in the track of the nqw cable, as it will pass to the eastward of the North Atlantic’s big hole, S'ohm Deep, south of . Newfoundland, where, the sea bed is just over four miles below the surface (writes a deep-sea electrician in the "Daily Mail"). Most Atlantic passengers feel that the farther they get from laud Ihe deeper it is becoming. As a matter of fact, a belt of comparatively shallow water called the North Atlantic Rise and the South Atlantic Rise runs all the way down the middle of this ocean from Greenland to the Antarctic Jami mass. Moreover, much to the satisfaction of tho layers of deep-sea cables, a great ridge called the 'Telegraph Plateau haa been found to stretch from Britain to Newfoundland. A submarine cable, oven when made with British brains and skill, is liable to many and stranga accidents. •Seabed earthquakes cause many an overstrain and break, and whales, icebergs, and swordfish have helped to keep repair ships busy. Land wires keep clean, hut a host of parasites that would overcrowd every aquarium and museum on earth' live on and in any long-distance deep-sea cable. Often from a veritable bush of seaweed, as the grapnel brings up a broken end, come dozens of gaudy hyaline crabs, each a mixture of yellow, blue, crimson, and green. Sponges and zoophytes, corals of many kinds, starfish. shellfish, and queer creatures that only a. marine biologist could identify, have battened upon tho cable or established themselves in the thickets of weeds which themselves are rooted on it In the warm seas two little creatures, the xylonhagon. (a bivalve shellfish) amt n frail, tinv worm named Timnoria tenebrous. have cost (ho cable companies tons of thousands nf pounds bv their way of boring into tho tough fabric of tho sea-hod wires. Boeont improvements in tho shoothiim of cables, however, have almost baffled tho borers.