High-speed internet could be coming to Antarctica

Despite its central role in Antarctic research, the McMurdo Station is lacking something most scientists working at 21st-century laboratories take for granted: high-speed internet. McMurdo sits on the only continent that doesn’t have a high-speed fiber optic cable connection to the rest of the world. In early 2021, the National Science Foundation began seriously exploring the possibility of building a fiber optic cable that would travel along the seafloor from Antarctica to neighboring New Zealand or Australia. The idea was first raised a little over a decade ago but lost traction as other projects took priority. If this latest effort to modernize Antarctica’s internet is a success, scientists say it would transform both research and daily life on the frozen continent. Currently, researchers in Antarctica rely on low-bandwidth satellites to communicate with the outside world. Researchers often have to store their data on hard drives to physically bring back home rather than exporting it for their colleagues to analyze in real time. This creates a bottleneck that slows scientific research.