The Luzon Strait

Assembled from 27 blocks · 2 evidence · 35 related

1. Story
2. The water between Taiwan and the northern Philippines, and the single most consequential cable corridor in East Asia. It is the only deep passage between the South China Sea and the Pacific in that latitude band — the Bashi Channel, its widest and deepest opening, has a sill depth of roughly 2,180 m — so the cables linking Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan to each other and to North America nearly all pass through it. The seabed underneath is among the worst in the world for the purpose. The strait sits on the collision boundary between the Philippine Sea Plate and the Eurasian Plate, it is seismically very active, and it is cut by submarine canyons that funnel sediment into the Manila Trench, so a large offshore earthquake here does not merely shake cables: it sets sediment flows moving down the slope that break them in sequence over many hours across hundreds of kilometres. That combination — the only deep route, and the least stable seabed — is why the Luzon Strait is the canonical example of concentration risk in the physical internet, and why the events of December 2006 there are studied as a natural experiment rather than as an accident.
3. Knowledge
4. The cable chokepoint
5. The Luzon Strait
6. Taiwan
7. Connections
8. Taiwan
9. The cable chokepoint
10. The Hengchun earthquake doublet off southern Taiwan
11. Cables in the Luzon Strait break in sequence over nine hours
12. East Asian connectivity degrades for weeks
13. The Luzon Strait
14. Austronesian
15. The Austronesian expansion
16. Blust's Austronesian subgrouping places the deepest divisions in Taiwan
17. Austronesian speakers move out of Taiwan
18. The AI accelerator
19. Marseille
20. The Luzon Strait
21. The Red Sea cable corridor
22. The Strait of Malacca
23. Redundancy and restoration in the cable network
24. Four cables fail off Côte d'Ivoire and thirteen countries lose connectivity
25. Evidence
26. Supports the account of the 2006 Luzon Strait cable failures as a sequential process driven by earthquake-triggered sediment density flows running down submarine canyons into the Manila Trench, with flow speeds of several metres per second inferred from break timings. V55 verification basis: NOT read; retrieved in summary only. Published break counts for the 2006 event differ between analyses — eight, nine, eleven, thirteen and twenty-two all appear — and this pack states the range rather than adopting one.
27. Supports the scale figures used in this pack: more than 600 active and planned systems and over 1.5 million route-kilometres in service as of early 2026, and the standard statement that submarine cables carry well over 95 per cent of international data traffic. V55 verification basis: retrieved by search, not opened — this session has no working WebFetch to telegeography.com. TeleGeography is a commercial research firm and is the de facto public register for this industry precisely because no public authority maintains one; the figures should be read as its counts on its own definitions, and they move every year.