On November 11, 2025, an X5.1-class solar flare, the strongest of the year, tore off the surface of the sun and triggered widespread radio blackouts and geomagnetic disturbances as it swept toward Earth. NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center confirmed Solar Cycle 25 was running well ahead of its own forecasts, producing roughly 50 percent more X-class flares than predicted. Almost simultaneously, an entirely different category of risk was making headlines for undersea infrastructure: Recorded Future’s threat intelligence group documented 44 publicly reported submarine cable damage incidents across 32 distinct groupings in 2024 and 2025 alone, driven by anchor drags, suspected sabotage in the Baltic Sea and Taiwan Strait, and geopolitical tension. Two very active, very current risk categories for the same physical infrastructure, carrying nearly all global internet traffic — and, as far as the record shows, they’re being assessed by almost entirely separate professional communities.
The Scientific Foundation
Geomagnetic storms occur when solar wind disturbances slam into Earth’s magnetosphere, inducing electric currents, called geomagnetically induced currents, in any sufficiently long conductor, including power lines, pipelines, and undersea cables. These storms are classified on a G1 to G5 scale, and NASA’s DAGGER system, a deep learning model trained on satellite data from the ACE and DSCOVR spacecraft, can now predict the precise geographic impact location of an incoming geomagnetic disturbance roughly 30 minutes before it actually strikes Earth’s atmosphere. As of early 2026, Solar Cycle 25 was producing repeated peaks rather than isolated events, with several storms pushing the Dst geomagnetic disturbance index below -200 nanotesla — researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder characterized the period as a genuine shift into a high-risk phase, though still well short of the roughly -500 nanotesla associated with the 1859 Carrington Event, the largest geomagnetic storm on record.
Undersea cables carry a specific vulnerability that power grids largely don’t share: unlike terrestrial grid operators, who can proactively shut down or reconfigure transformers ahead of an incoming storm, submarine cable operators can’t instantly shut down a backbone cable without disrupting global network synchronization, according to a 2026 analysis of the risk — meaning the infrastructure has to simply absorb whatever a geomagnetic storm delivers to its undersea repeaters and amplifiers along the cable route. Separately, the submarine cable insurance industry has developed into a genuinely specialized niche, with dedicated providers like InterProtect integrating marine warranty surveying and risk engineering directly into underwriting decisions specifically for cable projects, reflecting how much this infrastructure category has outgrown generic marine insurance products.
The Cross-Domain Connection
The genuinely underexplored synthesis here is that submarine cable risk assessment and underwriting, based on the current record, appears heavily weighted toward physical and geopolitical threats, anchor dragging, fishing gear damage, and increasingly, deliberate sabotage amid rising geopolitical tension, rather than space weather. A December 2025 legal and insurance analysis of global submarine cable risks from DWF Group discusses the Nord Stream pipeline incidents, Red Sea cable damage possibly linked to Houthi activity, and Baltic Sea sabotage concerns in detail, but doesn’t address geomagnetic or solar storm risk as a distinct underwriting category at all. Meanwhile, the space weather risk analysis community, tracking Solar Cycle 25’s unexpectedly intense activity and building increasingly sophisticated forecasting tools like DAGGER, has focused its infrastructure-protection attention overwhelmingly on power grids and satellite operators, the traditional, well-established space weather risk constituencies, rather than the marine insurance underwriters who specifically price submarine cable risk.
That’s a real gap worth naming directly: geomagnetically induced currents are a documented physical mechanism capable of affecting long undersea conductors, solar cycle forecasting has matured to the point of 30-minute advance warning for storm impact location, and the submarine cable insurance industry has developed genuinely sophisticated, specialized underwriting models, but as far as the current published risk-analysis and insurance-industry literature shows, these three pieces haven’t yet been formally combined into a space-weather-informed cable risk pricing model, the way, for instance, hurricane forecasting has long been integrated into coastal property insurance underwriting.
What Remains Undemonstrated
This needs to be stated plainly: no published research or insurance-industry analysis located here documents marine cable underwriters formally incorporating solar cycle forecasting or geomagnetic storm probability into cable insurance risk models. The scale of actual historical damage to submarine cables specifically from geomagnetic storms, as opposed to power grid transformers, which have well-documented storm-damage case studies going back decades, is not established in the current literature reviewed here — meaning it remains an open, testable question rather than a demonstrated risk category, whether geomagnetically induced currents pose a submarine-cable-specific damage risk large enough to justify dedicated underwriting attention, or whether modern fiber-optic cable engineering (as opposed to older copper telegraph and telephone cables, which had well-documented 19th and 20th century geomagnetic storm vulnerabilities) has already substantially mitigated this exposure through modern repeater and shielding design. Building a genuine space-weather-informed cable risk model would require exactly the kind of historical damage correlation analysis that, as far as this research shows, hasn’t yet been published or conducted.
Why It Matters
The stakes for closing this gap, even just to determine whether it’s a real gap or a non-issue, are proportional to how much modern life now depends on submarine cables: they carry nearly all global internet and financial transaction traffic, and Solar Cycle 25’s unexpectedly intense activity through 2025 and into 2026, combined with rising anchor-drag and sabotage incidents documented in the same period, means this infrastructure is facing simultaneous, elevated risk from two largely independent hazard categories at once. If geomagnetic risk to modern fiber-optic submarine cables turns out to be genuinely material, formally integrating solar cycle forecasting into cable insurance underwriting, the way hurricane and earthquake forecasting are already integrated into other categories of catastrophe insurance, would represent a meaningful modernization of how this critical infrastructure category prices and manages risk. If it turns out modern cable engineering has already solved the problem, that’s valuable to establish clearly too, rather than leaving the question unexamined in either direction.
The Human Dimension
There’s something quietly disorienting about the idea that the infrastructure carrying nearly every email, bank transfer, and video call between continents sits exposed simultaneously to a warship’s dragging anchor and to a solar flare that erupted from the sun’s surface eight minutes earlier — two threats from opposite ends of the scale of human concern, geopolitics and astrophysics, that happen to converge on the exact same few strands of glass at the bottom of the ocean. Whether the second threat turns out to matter as much as the first is still, honestly, an open question. But it’s the kind of open question worth someone in the insurance industry actually asking, rather than one that quietly falls between two well-funded, well-staffed, but entirely separate professional communities.
Sources:
1. “Trend analysis: Space weather & geomagnetic risk — where the value pools are (and who captures them),” Sustainability Atlas, March 2026 — https://sustainableatlas.org/post/trend-analysis-space-weather-geomagnetic-risk-where-the-value-pools-are-and-who–2973
2. “Severe geomagnetic storm threatened power grids and communications worldwide,” CTIF, November 2025 — https://ctif.org/news/severe-geomagnetic-storm-threatened-power-grids-and-communications-worldwide-nov-12-2025
3. “The Internet Apocalypse and Solar Storms: Separating Science from Panic,” Orbital Today, May 2026 — https://orbitaltoday.com/2026/05/09/internet-apocalypse-can-a-solar-storm-actually-disconnect-the-world/
4. “Submarine Cable Security at Risk Amid Geopolitical Tensions & Limited Repair Capabilities,” Recorded Future / Insikt Group — https://www.recordedfuture.com/research/submarine-cables-face-increasing-threats
5. “Global risks to submarine cables,” DWF Group, December 2025 — https://dwfgroup.com/en/news-and-insights/insights/2025/9/global-risks-to-submarine-cables-legal-security-and-insurance-challenges
6. “The dangers of geomagnetic storms,” Allianz Commercial, February 2026 — https://commercial.allianz.com/news-and-insights/expert-risk-articles/geomagnetic-storms.html
7. InterProtect — subsea cable insurance provider — https://www.interprotect.co.uk/
Idea originated at artificialideas.org. Article researched and written by Claude Sonnet 4.6. Published at artificialideas.org.
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