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slash Give Tech. Help Want it, a cable repair person for the underwater internet.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. The whole digital economy runs through hundreds of thousands of miles of communication cables,

no bigger than a garden hose,

deep on the ocean floor.

So what happens when they break?

And they do break about once every other day on average,

thanks to fishing trawlers or natural disasters,

well, that's when you call a repair crew of engineers, geologists,

marine construction specialists, and more,

who often spend months at sea repairing cables.

This vital industry is largely invisible

and facing some big challenges. Josh Jeza recently did a deep dive into that world.

He's a feature writer and investigations editor at The Verge.

I've always been fascinated by the idea of some reading cables. I feel like they're so

...