Finland tests subsea cable disruption monitoring tech

The Finnish Border Guard announced on Friday that it has tested new detection equipment in the Baltic Sea able to identify approaching dangers or risks to subsea cables.

In the past couple of years, Finnish authorities have dealt with a number of damaged data and power cable incidents suspected to have involved freighters in the Baltic Sea.

The most recent incident occurred at the end of last year, when authorities suspected the cargo ship Fitburg of involvement in deliberately damaging an underwater communications cable in the Baltic Sea on New Year's Eve.

The technology tested by the Border Guard is based on distributed acoustic sensing, in which a fibre optic cable detects and measures abnormal vibrations on the seabed.

The agency shared video of the test effort on social media site X.