CNN10 2025-01-29
CNN 10
Protecting The Internet Under The Sea; Fears That the World's Biggest Iceberg Could Hit Island in the South Atlantic; Tiny QR Codes Help Scientists Track Bee Movements. Aired 4-4:10a ET
Aired January 29, 2025 - 04:00 ET
鈫�
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
COY WIRE, CNN 10 ANCHOR: Hello, and welcome to the show. I'm Coy Wire. This is CNN 10, your 10 minutes of news where I tell you the what, letting you decide what to think. It's Wednesday, January 29th. It's Your Word Wednesday, so listen up to see if your word helped us write today's show.
It's a good one. So are you ready? Let's go.
We start in Europe, where NATO allies are facing a new threat in rising tensions with Russia after a series of suspected attacks on undersea cables. Last month, on Christmas morning, Estonians woke up with their power supply cut by one third when the Estlink-2 undersea power cable linking Estonia to Finland failed.
Finnish officials say a Cook Islands flagged tanker carrying oil from Russia to Turkey apparently dragged its anchor over the cable, damaging it.
There are dozens of vulnerable and unprotected internet and power cables lying on the seabed of the Baltic Sea.
And more than 95% of data worldwide moves through more than 1 million kilometers of those cables, spanning more than 80,000 miles. Repairs for this kind of damage are costly and can take months to fix, raising fears that a concerted attack could paralyze communication networks, jeopardize hospital surgeries, police responses and more.
Thankfully, the incident has had just a modicum of effect on Estonia because of reserve energy supplies, but it sounded the alarm for NATO officials already tracking incidents of suspected cable cutting.
In a matter of weeks, the alliance mobilized a group of warships to specifically prevent these suspected attacks, stepping up patrols on the Baltic Sea and increasing coordination with border guards from the nations affected.
Russia denies having any role in the incidents. NATO officials note that the ships involved originate in or are traveling to a Russian port.
CNN's Nic Robertson shows us how NATO's Baltic Sentry mission is using high tech tools to protect these undersea cables.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR (voice-over): Sunrise around a hundred miles from Russia on the near freezing Baltic Sea tension mounts.
NATO is retooling for a new war, a hybrid war. Ultra-modern sophisticated tech is being prepped for underwater action. Specialized subsea drones designed to dive deep below the surface.
(On camera): This is the sharp end of the mission, protecting our Internet. It's not up there in the sky, it's under the sea.
(Voice-over): NATO's mission, Baltic Sentry, is a rapid response to an escalating new threat. Multiple cables cut in recent months.
(On camera): And this is what the undersea Internet cables look like -- this size. They're tiny, they're vulnerable, they're easily cut.
(Voice-over): In these waters, between Estonia and Finland and beyond, an unseen enemy is believed to have been targeting Internet and power cables.
The subsea drones and the battleships getting eyes on the threat.
COMMANDER ARJEN WARNAAR, NATO MARITIME GROUP 1: A lot of the ships that we found are acting strangely, originate in a Russian port or are going to a Russian port.
ROBERTSON: This ship anchor suspected of being dragged on the seabed, intentionally damaging cables, Christmas Day.
(On camera): How far have these anchors been dragged to the sea?
WARNAAR: I understand a couple of hundred miles.
ROBERTSON: Is that normal?
WARNAAR: No.
ROBERTSON: How does that happen? Can a captain not notice?
WARNAAR: Very good question. And my guess is no, a captain does know that, and that's probably intentional.
ROBERTSON (voice-over): Repairs can be complicated, costly, and take months. Worst case, an entire nation can be cut off from the Internet.
(On camera): Under the sea here, there are multiple cables linking Estonia with Finland, in the Baltic Sea, dozens more. The numbers keep growing, across the globe there are hundreds of cables.
(Voice-over): According to NATO, more than 800,000 miles of cable carrying $10 trillion of international trade. The mission critical enough to have expensive fighter jets on tap. Conditions at sea level though, the biggest challenge as we saw on a relatively calm day.
Each NATO warship bringing its own specialty. This one sonar, less than two weeks into the mission. Commanders at sea increasingly confident who is responsible.
(On camera): And who is the threat here?
COMMANDER ERIK KOCKX, NATO MINE COUNTERMEASURE GROUP 1: Russia. That's quite clear.
ROBERTSON (voice-over): Russia denies any role. But by this day's end, more NATO nations committing forces to Baltic Sentry. The flotilla growing. NATO HQ commanders facing tough choices.
CAPTAIN NIELS MARKUSSEN, DIRECTOR, NATO SHIPPING CENTRE: The proof, the smoking gun, it's very, very difficult. We have to balance between this moving into something that can become very ugly, and what I mean by that is warfare.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WIRE: Ten second trivia.
A piece of ice breaking from a glacier becomes an iceberg during what process?
Calving, halving, fissuring, or disintegration?
Answer is calving. The natural process that occurs when the movement of glacier ice makes the end of the glacier unstable, breaking off into icebergs.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is the largest iceberg in the world, and it could hit a nearby island. As of January, A23a spans an area of 3,643 square kilometers, that's about four times the land area of New York City and twice the size of London. Most icebergs typically last just a few years, but this megaberg broke off almost 40 years ago.
Now A23a has been heading north, spinning around and getting stuck for a while down in the southern Atlantic Ocean. And right now experts are worried it could hit the nearby British overseas territory of south Georgia. But this depends on the currents.
If it does hit, it could be a big deal for wildlife, the island's only permanent inhabitants. Penguins and seals could be in danger, and fishing and shipping industries could be impacted. However, it could split up into many more icebergs, which would be harder to track and impact ships.
Scientists say this iceberg probably broke away naturally, but the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis means Antarctica is experiencing more worrying changes with potentially devastating consequences for global sea level rise.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WIRE: Today, we are giving a big old 10 out of 10 to the scientists who glued tiny QR codes to the backs of about 30,000 bees, all in the name of science. For months, researchers worked to carefully attach QR codes smaller than a fingernail to young worker bees, averaging about 600 bees every two weeks across six bee colonies. Biologists did the painstaking work to unravel the mysteries of how often and how far the persistent pollinators travel from their hives.
Our Jeremy Roth is the bees niece for showing us how it works.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JEREMY ROTH, CNN DIGITAL VIDEO PRODUCER AND WRITER (voiceover): A newly published and buzzworthy study saw scientists outfit honeybees with itty-bitty QR codes to track their movements.
You know those weird little pixelated symbols that link you to info when scanned by your phone's camera? Well, researchers at Penn State University glued similar tiny codes no bigger than a pinky nail to the backs of some 30-plus thousand honeybees in various hive locations in Pennsylvania and New York that were outfitted with a digital scanning system.
The coded bees were then scanned as they exited and entered the hives in an effort to better understand the travel and foraging habits of the species.
Published in the journal "HardwareX," the results not only saw surprising evidence of how long the tagged bees spent outside the hives and factors that dictated their travel patterns, but the tracking also yielded unexpected new data suggesting honeybees may live up to twice as long as previously thought. That flies in the face of many schools of thought about these environmentally crucial critters.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WIRE: All right, thank you to everyone who submitted some stellar words for Your Word Wednesday. Congrats to Mrs. Baxter's class in Levittown, PA at Pennsbury High School West. Modicum, a noun meaning a small portion or a limited quantity. Go birds. Thanks for boosting our vocab today.
Our special shout out today goes to Campbell County Middle School in Alexandria, Kentucky. We see you, Camels. And happy hump day to you.
Did you know camels can run as fast as racehorses? I was two-day years old when I learned that.
Have an awesome day, everyone. I'll see you right back here on CNN 10.
END
CNN 10
Protecting The Internet Under The Sea; Fears That the World's Biggest Iceberg Could Hit Island in the South Atlantic; Tiny QR Codes Help Scientists Track Bee Movements. Aired 4-4:10a ET
Aired January 29, 2025 - 04:00 ET
鈫�
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
COY WIRE, CNN 10 ANCHOR: Hello, and welcome to the show. I'm Coy Wire. This is CNN 10, your 10 minutes of news where I tell you the what, letting you decide what to think. It's Wednesday, January 29th. It's Your Word Wednesday, so listen up to see if your word helped us write today's show.
It's a good one. So are you ready? Let's go.
We start in Europe, where NATO allies are facing a new threat in rising tensions with Russia after a series of suspected attacks on undersea cables. Last month, on Christmas morning, Estonians woke up with their power supply cut by one third when the Estlink-2 undersea power cable linking Estonia to Finland failed.
Finnish officials say a Cook Islands flagged tanker carrying oil from Russia to Turkey apparently dragged its anchor over the cable, damaging it.
There are dozens of vulnerable and unprotected internet and power cables lying on the seabed of the Baltic Sea.
And more than 95% of data worldwide moves through more than 1 million kilometers of those cables, spanning more than 80,000 miles. Repairs for this kind of damage are costly and can take months to fix, raising fears that a concerted attack could paralyze communication networks, jeopardize hospital surgeries, police responses and more.
Thankfully, the incident has had just a modicum of effect on Estonia because of reserve energy supplies, but it sounded the alarm for NATO officials already tracking incidents of suspected cable cutting.
In a matter of weeks, the alliance mobilized a group of warships to specifically prevent these suspected attacks, stepping up patrols on the Baltic Sea and increasing coordination with border guards from the nations affected.
Russia denies having any role in the incidents. NATO officials note that the ships involved originate in or are traveling to a Russian port.
CNN's Nic Robertson shows us how NATO's Baltic Sentry mission is using high tech tools to protect these undersea cables.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR (voice-over): Sunrise around a hundred miles from Russia on the near freezing Baltic Sea tension mounts.
NATO is retooling for a new war, a hybrid war. Ultra-modern sophisticated tech is being prepped for underwater action. Specialized subsea drones designed to dive deep below the surface.
(On camera): This is the sharp end of the mission, protecting our Internet. It's not up there in the sky, it's under the sea.
(Voice-over): NATO's mission, Baltic Sentry, is a rapid response to an escalating new threat. Multiple cables cut in recent months.
(On camera): And this is what the undersea Internet cables look like -- this size. They're tiny, they're vulnerable, they're easily cut.
(Voice-over): In these waters, between Estonia and Finland and beyond, an unseen enemy is believed to have been targeting Internet and power cables.
The subsea drones and the battleships getting eyes on the threat.
COMMANDER ARJEN WARNAAR, NATO MARITIME GROUP 1: A lot of the ships that we found are acting strangely, originate in a Russian port or are going to a Russian port.
ROBERTSON: This ship anchor suspected of being dragged on the seabed, intentionally damaging cables, Christmas Day.
(On camera): How far have these anchors been dragged to the sea?
WARNAAR: I understand a couple of hundred miles.
ROBERTSON: Is that normal?
WARNAAR: No.
ROBERTSON: How does that happen? Can a captain not notice?
WARNAAR: Very good question. And my guess is no, a captain does know that, and that's probably intentional.
ROBERTSON (voice-over): Repairs can be complicated, costly, and take months. Worst case, an entire nation can be cut off from the Internet.
(On camera): Under the sea here, there are multiple cables linking Estonia with Finland, in the Baltic Sea, dozens more. The numbers keep growing, across the globe there are hundreds of cables.
(Voice-over): According to NATO, more than 800,000 miles of cable carrying $10 trillion of international trade. The mission critical enough to have expensive fighter jets on tap. Conditions at sea level though, the biggest challenge as we saw on a relatively calm day.
Each NATO warship bringing its own specialty. This one sonar, less than two weeks into the mission. Commanders at sea increasingly confident who is responsible.
(On camera): And who is the threat here?
COMMANDER ERIK KOCKX, NATO MINE COUNTERMEASURE GROUP 1: Russia. That's quite clear.
ROBERTSON (voice-over): Russia denies any role. But by this day's end, more NATO nations committing forces to Baltic Sentry. The flotilla growing. NATO HQ commanders facing tough choices.
CAPTAIN NIELS MARKUSSEN, DIRECTOR, NATO SHIPPING CENTRE: The proof, the smoking gun, it's very, very difficult. We have to balance between this moving into something that can become very ugly, and what I mean by that is warfare.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WIRE: Ten second trivia.
A piece of ice breaking from a glacier becomes an iceberg during what process?
Calving, halving, fissuring, or disintegration?
Answer is calving. The natural process that occurs when the movement of glacier ice makes the end of the glacier unstable, breaking off into icebergs.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is the largest iceberg in the world, and it could hit a nearby island. As of January, A23a spans an area of 3,643 square kilometers, that's about four times the land area of New York City and twice the size of London. Most icebergs typically last just a few years, but this megaberg broke off almost 40 years ago.
Now A23a has been heading north, spinning around and getting stuck for a while down in the southern Atlantic Ocean. And right now experts are worried it could hit the nearby British overseas territory of south Georgia. But this depends on the currents.
If it does hit, it could be a big deal for wildlife, the island's only permanent inhabitants. Penguins and seals could be in danger, and fishing and shipping industries could be impacted. However, it could split up into many more icebergs, which would be harder to track and impact ships.
Scientists say this iceberg probably broke away naturally, but the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis means Antarctica is experiencing more worrying changes with potentially devastating consequences for global sea level rise.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WIRE: Today, we are giving a big old 10 out of 10 to the scientists who glued tiny QR codes to the backs of about 30,000 bees, all in the name of science. For months, researchers worked to carefully attach QR codes smaller than a fingernail to young worker bees, averaging about 600 bees every two weeks across six bee colonies. Biologists did the painstaking work to unravel the mysteries of how often and how far the persistent pollinators travel from their hives.
Our Jeremy Roth is the bees niece for showing us how it works.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JEREMY ROTH, CNN DIGITAL VIDEO PRODUCER AND WRITER (voiceover): A newly published and buzzworthy study saw scientists outfit honeybees with itty-bitty QR codes to track their movements.
You know those weird little pixelated symbols that link you to info when scanned by your phone's camera? Well, researchers at Penn State University glued similar tiny codes no bigger than a pinky nail to the backs of some 30-plus thousand honeybees in various hive locations in Pennsylvania and New York that were outfitted with a digital scanning system.
The coded bees were then scanned as they exited and entered the hives in an effort to better understand the travel and foraging habits of the species.
Published in the journal "HardwareX," the results not only saw surprising evidence of how long the tagged bees spent outside the hives and factors that dictated their travel patterns, but the tracking also yielded unexpected new data suggesting honeybees may live up to twice as long as previously thought. That flies in the face of many schools of thought about these environmentally crucial critters.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WIRE: All right, thank you to everyone who submitted some stellar words for Your Word Wednesday. Congrats to Mrs. Baxter's class in Levittown, PA at Pennsbury High School West. Modicum, a noun meaning a small portion or a limited quantity. Go birds. Thanks for boosting our vocab today.
Our special shout out today goes to Campbell County Middle School in Alexandria, Kentucky. We see you, Camels. And happy hump day to you.
Did you know camels can run as fast as racehorses? I was two-day years old when I learned that.
Have an awesome day, everyone. I'll see you right back here on CNN 10.
END