n undersea fiberoptic cable located between mainland Norway and the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean has been put out of action in a still-mysterious incident. The outage on the subsea communications cable — the furthest north of its kind anywhere in the world — follows an incident last year in which different cables linking an undersea surveillance network off the Norwegian coast were severed, a story that we covered in detail at the time.
The latest disruption involves one of two fiberoptic cables that enable communications between the Norwegian mainland and Norwegian-administered Svalbard that lies between the mainland and the North Pole. The outage occurred on the morning of January 7, but was first widely reported yesterday. The extent of the damage is not clear from the official press release from Space Norway, the country’s space agency, which maintains the cables primarily in support of the Svalbard Satellite Station (SvalSat), but it is significant enough that it is expected to require the services of an ocean-going cable-laying vessel.
Bjoertvedt/Wikimedia Commons
The Svalbard Satellite Station atop the mountain of Platåberget on the island of Spitsbergen in Svalbard, Norway.
In addition to the SvalSat facilities, the fiber-optic cables provide broadband internet to Svalbard. The SvalSat site consists of more than 100 satellite antennas on a mountain plateau and is the largest commercial ground station of its kind.
Being located between mainland Norway and the North Pole means that SvalSat is in much demand with operators of polar-orbiting satellites, being one of only two ground stations from which data can be downloaded from these types of satellites on each of the Earth’s rotations.
Space Norway, which operates the undersea cables, confirms that the second is still functioning normally, but the loss of the first means there is now no redundancy available until repairs can be made.
The Federal Aviation Administration has finally put out an official statement regarding a still very mysterious ground stop order that it issued to all aircraft in the western U.S. and Hawaii yesterday around 2:30 PM PST. While the incident is now confirmed, there are still a significant number of unanswered questions, including the most important one: what triggered this decision in the first place? You can get up to speed first on what The War Zone had been able to determine in our initial reporting here
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued their statement just before 9:40 AM PST this afternoon, over 20 hours after the order was sent. The War Zone had already reached out to the FAA with a number of basic questions regarding the event, but we have still not received a direct response.
FAA’s full statement, so far, regarding this incident, is as follows:
As a matter of precaution, the FAA temporarily paused departures at some airports along the West Coast on Monday night. Full operations resumed in less than 15 minutes. The FAA regularly takes precautionary measures. We are reviewing the process around this ground stop as we do after all such events.
This statement is immediately curious for a number of reasons. For one, publicly available recordings of air traffic controllers on the ground talking with pilots at the time show that this pause was not limited to the West Coast of the continental United States. For instance, pilots in Honolulu, Hawaii were given similar instructions.
HONOLULU TOWER advising HAL278 that the ground stop orders came from the FAA Command Center. They never gave a reason for the ground stop. pic.twitter.com/XasWmFwGap
One source, a pilot flying into Yuma, Arizona, which lies around 150 miles inland from the West Coast, told The War Zone that the alert had been described to them as “national ground stop.” This also highlights that we know that the stop order did not only impact departures. Other air traffic control recordings make clear that even some aircraft were ordered to land as soon as possible, as well.
Re: the west coast ground stop of air traffic today, here’s Burbank ATC telling a pilot due to a national security issue he can’t just fly around to avoid the stop, and needs to land. “I need you to go ahead and land at Van Nuys at this time.” pic.twitter.com/hQPnvTxnf7
The FAA statement makes no mention of what prompted it to take this “precaution,” either. Air traffic controllers at Burbank in California can be heard in one recording referencing an unspecified “national security threat.”
Just a few minutes before they told that aircraft they weren’t allowing aircraft to maneuver in the area due to a “national security threat” and it had to land, another plane that had just taken off was told it had to turn around and land. “Something’s going on.” pic.twitter.com/KAWGM3ZWuf
There had been reports, as well as general speculation, that the ground stop may have been related to a North Korean missile launch that occurred right at almost the same time that FAA issued its order. This was not entirely out of the realm of reason.
Bjoertvedt/Wikimedia Commons