LAYING A CABLE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19946, 13 November 1926, Page 24

LAYING A CABLE.

THE INITIAL DIFFICULTIES. Out on the heaving wastes of the grey Atlantic the cable-layer Colonia is slowly letting down the new cable that is to transmit our messages to New York at the amazing speed of 500 words a minute, states "A Deep-sea Electrician” in the Daily _ Mail. There will bo no very great depths in the track of the new cable, as it will pass to the eastward of the North Atlantic’s big hole, the Suhm Deep, south of Newfoundland, where the sea bed is just over four miles below the surface.

Most Atlantic passengers feel that the farther they get from land the deeper it is becoming. As a matter of fact, a belt of comparatively shallow water called the North Atlantic Rise runs all the way down the middle of this ocer.n from Greenland to the Antarctic land mass. Moreover, much to the satisfaction of the layers of deep-sea cables, a great ridge called the Telegraph Plateau has been found to stretch from Britain to Newfoundland. A submarine cable, even when made with British brains and skill, is liable to many and strange accidents. Sea bed earthquakes cause many an overstrain and break, and whales, icebergs, nd swordfish have helped to keep repair ehiigj busy. Land wires keep clean, but a host of parasites that would overcrow'd every equarium and rhuseum on earth live on and in any long-distance deep-sea cable. Often from a veritable bush of seaweed, as the grapnel firings up a broken end. come dozens of gaudy hvaline crabs, each a mixture of yellow, blue, crimson, and green. zoophytes, corals of many kinds, starfish, shellfish, and queer* creatures that only a marine bioligst could identify have battened upon the cable or established themselves in the thickets of weeds which themselves are rooted on it. In the warm seas two little creatures, the xylophagon (a bivalve shellfish) and a frail, tiny worm named Limnoria tenebrans. have cost the cable companies tens of thousands of pounds by their way of boring into the tough fabric of the sea-bed wires. Recent improvements in the sheathing of cables, however, have almost baffled the borers.