Tangential, after reading the description of the archipelago.
Sweden is the country with most islands in the world, followed by Norway and Finland.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/which-countries-have-the...
If you've never visited the Stockholm archipelago, I highly recommend it. In fact, I think it's perhaps the best thing about Stockholm, and one of the most beautiful places in the world in general — if you're into sailing, islands and seas. It's almost too easy to find an island just for yourself for the weekend, and "Allemansrätten", the law that grants people the right to access wilderness, only makes it even more accessible. Going there at the midst of winter or during summer are both very different experiences, but both are very charming.
Also, the superb torpedo museum!
Do they use the same methods to define "island"?
The section for Australia seems very broad: "Australia itself dominates the islands around its coastal fringe, which range in size from smaller rocks that are not covered by water at high tide to ..."
While it says the US has 18,617 islands, I struggle to find an official source for that very precise number.
I also see how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_of_Florida says "The U.S. state of Florida has a total of 4,510 islands that are ten acres or larger", suggesting that ten acres is the minimum sized used for "island" in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_of_Maine says "Maine is home to over 4,600 coastal islands, ranging from large landmasses like Mount Desert Island to small islets and ledges exposed above mean high tide."
Clearly these are not using the same definitions.
I managed to find the Global Islands data set at https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/63bdf25dd34e92aad3c... with an explorer at https://rmgsc.cr.usgs.gov/gie/ which should have exactly what I want, except 1) it only lists ocean islands, not inland ones, and 2) I can't figure out how to get the data by country.
It categories things as "Big Islands (greater than 1 km2), Small Islands (less than or equal to 1 km2 and greater than or equal to 0.0036 km2), and Very Small Islands (less than 0.0036 km2)." "There are 21,818 big islands in the database. The remaining 318,868 islands are all less than 1 km2 and are classed as small islands.'
I give up.
I don't think that quote implies a limit for the definition in any way. It just says that this is the count below a given threshold. It doesn't say anything about that threshold being a standard or anything of that sort.
There’s just literally no possible way that Sweden has an order of magnitude more islands than the US or Canada.
Open up Google Earth and scan around northern coastlines of all these countries and you’ll laugh at the premise of this article.
With that said I wouldn’t be surprised if they have the most documented/counted islands. That’s another thing entirely and also sort of interesting I suppose.
It all depends on what you count/map. By some european definition Sweden has 24 islands if you discount all the small ones. We basically have an extreme anount of small ones from the last ice age.
Bit whatever, it’s a great place to sail/visit no matter how you count.
It's actually quite an interesting question. The West Coast of the contiguous US has almost no islands, you really start getting "islandy" only in the Puget Sound.
The East Coast has more islands, but then you need to decide how you classify the river deltas. Is a bump in a brackish swamp an island or not?
On the other hand, Sweden has thousands of really small but also well-defined islands. They can be just several square meters in area, but they are well above the water and clearly separated from the main landmass.
Alaska has similar terrain, though.
Yeah I’m talking about more polar “drowned coastlines” which clearly are the place to go hunting for lots of islands. In the US that’s Maine and Alaska especially.
Sweden sure has a lot of islands I’d believe they are #1. It’s the +10x claim that seems suspicious.
In sweden if you dig a canal around some land, they call the result an island.
Does the canal make a fjord if one forgets to finish it?
yes, but you have to pine for it
Good thing they have a giant neon green spindle of fiber optic cable right next to the discreet cabin to help it blend in..
Undersea cables are also marked explicitly on all nautical charts. If a rented pleasure boat can, with plausible deniability as to intentionality, drag a hook across the sea floor and easily get away, the cabin isn’t the issue.
This isn’t the main weak point.
And the nautical charts are published by the responsible Swedish agency as well: https://geokatalog.sjofartsverket.se/kartvisarefyren/
Undersea cables are the squiggly lines.
I'd bet it's done this way to blend with the landscape, not to be a big secret.
Why doe it need to blend in? It's not a secret installation. The cabin is discreet simply because the red paint is the traditional colour for pretty much all rural plank clad non-residential buildings in Scandinavia. I doubt that any thought went into the colour scheme.
It's called Falu red [1], btw. Made from mining residual products and originally liked because it resembled luxurious brick.
Also common in early farm structures in America too which could likely be due to large immigration from Scandinavia. The iron oxide acts as an anti-fungal as well.
There's also an underlying theme of a resurgent clash of civilizations from yesteryears?
https://www.declad.com/falu-red-and-the-rise-and-fall-of-an-...
>During this time the Swedish Krona even moved from the gold to the copper standard.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/why-are-all-swedish-co...
Looking at the sea charts[1] of the archipelago and following a few undersea cables, I think it might be this cabin[2], which roughly matches with a map on GlobalConnects website[3].
Funnily enough, it's right next to a base of the Swedish military.
[1]: https://geokatalog.sjofartsverket.se/kartvisarefyren/
I wonder if sea cables could be designed with some mechanism that could stand being dragged and even crossed somewhere but returning later to its position automatically with a click. Something like a giant karabiner.
I'm sure it could, but whether it's cheaper than the existing cable and repairs is probably the question mark
Probably a stupid question, but why don't we encase the (undersea) cable in some metal container or something so that it would not be so easy to break? Is it due to economics? Is the constant fixing in the end cheaper than making it hard to break, or perhaps it needs maintenance anyway often enough to make it a hassle?
You have to encase the entire length of the cable, which can be hundreds of miles, but the attacker only needs to attack a single spot. The nordstream pipeline attacks have shown that planting explosives on undersea infrastructure isn't exactly hard, so you end up paying an enormous price to add a knee-high barrier for a would-be attacker.
It would cost so much material. I think it would be more economical to just bury it. With an automated robot of course. It would also make it a hell of a lot harder for an attacker to locate the cable. But I don't know if these already exist.
Because it would need to be pretty beefy in order to stop an anchor dragged by a big(-ish) ship and would be uneconomical.
If it does get damaged then repair would also be more expensive than current methods
They are armored when they get close to land. But at depth they are not because of weight & economics. Even if a cable were armored for the full length - I'm not sure it would withstand an intentional anchor-dragging.
Someone needs to do an A/B test. (no not really)
They mention at the end that it makes it heavier and harder to deploy, as well as how rare it is that they get damaged.
But I think this is the point of the article - that we start thinking with “a wartime mindset”. Which is a shame, but maybe necessary given the state of the world.
This would only be a stupid question if it had been explicitly addressed in the article linked.
A better approach may be to dig a few more tunnels like the Channel tunnel, and run some fiber through them.
The other approach that can work in some areas is to use a plough to bury the undersea cable in a trench. This is much slower, more expensive, and damaging to the marine environment.
https://www.royalihc.com/offshore-energy/offshore-equipment/...
1bn concurrent streams is a lot. Can satellites handle the same or more?
Why write about it then?
Even if you assume that enemies' intelligence already knows about it, then doesnt it just show that it doesn't work?
Or maybe it is just fake cabin?
There's no mystery to infra being both vulnerable and accessible, especially to belligerent world powers. It's all just degrees of consequence for attacking those components.
Additionally, a journalist would probably (reasonably) argue that writing about it exposes just how little consideration governments give to protecting this infra.
Russia is terrist state. EU under attack. The end.
be aware that the term 'terrorist' can be applied today to somebody that one day can win the Nobel prize for peace, and then become bad again. It is a label
Sure, but it is an appropriate label for Russia today.
> [T]he Guardian was given exclusive access to the Stockholm datacentre site. […] Daniel Aldstam, the chief security officer at GlobalConnect, which transports 50% of the internet capacity of the Nordics and runs the centre, described the approach to its location and ordinary outward appearance as “security through obscurity”.
How do you do that facepalm emoji on HN?
This is a good point.