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... In the fall of 2021, after determining that LoVe had lost a segment of cable, Zhang confronted the next question: Where was it? At that point he still thought that whatever happened had likely been inadvertent. A fishing trawler's net is often framed by weighty metal "doors" that keep it open as it drags through the water. If one of those had snagged the cable by accident and pulled it out of place, the crew might not even have noticed. Nonetheless, if Zhang could identify the ship and trace its path, he might have an idea of where to look for the missing equipment. ...

The maps showed about a dozen ships. Most of them had spent that April 3 tracing long arcs through a fishing ground a little to the southwest of the two relay units bracketing the missing segment. But one ship, a 197-foot-long, Russian-flagged trawler called the Saami, had behaved differently.

Traveling at about 10 knots, it had passed back and forth over the LoVe cable at least four times. "I saw this boat, only this one boat, cross the cable at this time," Zhang says. "I locked my suspicion on this one boat." Once he'd narrowed his parameters to the span of time when the cable disappeared, the paths of the other ships dropped away on his computer screen, leaving just the tight scribble traced by the Saami.

At the precise moment the cable went dead, the ship was right above it.

In late November, Zhang got a chance to trace the Saami's route in person. With the Arctic winter beginning and oil and gas work slowing, he was able to book a drone operator and time on one of the institute's own vessels, the G.O. Sars. He and his colleagues took the ship out from Troms, a city of 78,000 inside the Arctic Circle, and headed for the map coordinates marked by the Saami's AIS track from months before. ...