2025 First Drop

Our first weekly update of the new year; a return of subsea cables, quick look at Chinese AI, and an update on our Missives moving forward.

So, we’re well into the Year of the Snake. And things have of course changed since our New Year's Day post, even as other things continue. As we dive back into Geomastery's regular tempo, for GeoMissives, we’re doing a quick catch up on two areas that have caught our notice and we’ll finish up with some housekeeping details on our Substack and some changes of our own we'll be soon making.

Trawling for cables

Last November, we posted about the quiet hybrid sabotage Russia and China were committing to the world’s subsea cable network; a network that is crucial, relatively unprotected and, with the right equipment, easy to damage.

Since then, cases of cable damages by the same two implicated countries continue to ramp up:

• Mid-November, two cables were damaged in the Baltic Sea – hence our post noted above.

• During December, a Russian cargo ship loitered off the southern coast of Taiwan, roughly in the area of two cable connections for the island, the EAC-C2C and the SJC2.

• On Christmas Day, a po…