Yes, the original transatlantic telegraph cables are still sitting on the ocean floor. No one ever pulled them up, and under international law, no one has to. More than 150 years after they were laid, these copper-and-iron cables remain scattered across the North Atlantic seabed, with some sections still visible where they come ashore.
Why the Cables Were Never Removed
Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), there is no requirement to remove out-of-service submarine cables. The convention does require removal of abandoned “installations or structures” on the seabed to protect navigation, but cables and pipelines are specifically excluded from that definition. A coastal nation can require removal of a cable within its territorial waters, but none have done so for the old telegraph lines.
There’s also no practical reason to pull them up. Telecommunications cables are considered benign in the ocean environment, posing no pollution risk. Some jurisdictions, like New Jersey, have even authorized the use of out-of-service cables as material for artificial reefs. The cost of recovering thousands of miles of cable from depths reaching over two miles would far exceed the scrap value of the copper inside.
What’s Visible at the Shore Landings
The most tangible proof that the cables still exist is at Heart’s Content, Newfoundland, where the cables came ashore on the Canadian side. This site, which Canada has submitted to UNESCO’s tentative World Heritage list, preserves the 1875 cable station building along with the shoreline where six telegraph cables from Valentia Island, Ireland, landed between 1866 and 1894. Five of those cables are still visible protruding from the shoreline. Six later cables can also be seen running from the shore into the station building, where all the connections are still intact inside.
On the Irish side, Valentia Island retains its own cable station and landing points. Both sites together form a remarkably complete physical record of 19th-century telecommunications.
How Many Cables Are Down There
The transatlantic telegraph cable wasn’t a single wire. It was a series of cables laid over decades, each one an improvement on the last. The first attempt in 1858 worked for only about three months before failing on October 20 of that year. The signal gradually weakened, likely due to damage to the insulation, and the cable went permanently dead.
That failed cable was never recovered from the deep ocean. It remains on the seabed along its route between Ireland and Newfoundland. The next major effort came in 1865, when the massive steamship Great Eastern set out with a complete cable. That attempt also hit trouble: the signal weakened 80 miles out, and the crew spent nearly two days reversing the enormous ship to recover and splice the bad section. They eventually lost the cable end in deep water. It wasn’t until 1866 that a cable was successfully laid and kept working. The Great Eastern then went back, grappled the lost 1865 cable from the ocean floor, spliced it to new wire, and completed a second working line.
By the end of the 19th century, multiple telegraph cables crossed the Atlantic, laid by competing companies along various routes. All of them eventually became obsolete and were abandoned in place.
Evidence from Modern Cable-Laying
We know the old cables are still there because modern projects keep finding them. When the Hibernia Express fiber-optic cable was laid across the Atlantic in 2015, the route had to be surveyed and cleared of earlier cables. Engineers documented the process of locating and clearing many older Atlantic cables that lay in the path of the new line. In some cases, short sections were recovered or moved aside. One documented recovery effort pulled up about 40 nautical miles of old cable. But these were localized clearing operations, not systematic removal projects. The vast majority of historical cable remains undisturbed on the seabed.
What the Cables Look Like Today
The original cables were built to survive the ocean. The 1866 cable, for example, consisted of a copper conductor surrounded by gutta-percha insulation (a natural rubber-like material), wrapped in tarred hemp, and armored with iron wire. In shallower waters near shore, the cables received extra-heavy armor to resist anchors and tidal forces. In the deep ocean, the construction was lighter.
After more than a century and a half underwater, the iron armor has corroded significantly in most locations, and the organic insulation has degraded. In deep, cold water with low oxygen levels, preservation is better than in shallow coastal areas. The copper core, being highly resistant to corrosion, is likely the best-preserved component. Where cables have been found by remotely operated vehicles or cable-laying crews, they typically appear as encrusted, partially buried lines on the seabed, sometimes colonized by marine organisms.
So the short answer: the cables are still there, nobody is required to remove them, and pieces of them are visible to this day at the Newfoundland and Irish shore stations where Victorian-era engineers first connected two continents by wire.