The Luzon Strait

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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.