WIRED’s Jane Ruffino spent time aboard the MV Maasvliet to document the recovery of the historic TAT-8, the first-ever transoceanic fiber-optic cable. Laid in 1988, TAT-8 witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the birth of the World Wide Web, and the dawn of social media before being taken out of service in 2002. Now, after sitting lifeless on the seabed for over two decades, Subsea Environmental Services is bringing it back up.
Subsea is one of only two companies that has made cable recovery and recycling its entire business. Much of TAT-8 is getting a new life, with copper heading to manufacturers, steel becoming fencing, and polyethylene being recycled into pellets. As cofounder John Theodoracopulos told WIRED, the work is like “cleaning up space junk or all the oxygen bottles that are left at base camp at Everest.”
Read the full feature to go behind the scenes aboard our vessel and into the history of the cable that made the global internet possible.