Monitoring of Critical Undersea Infrastructures: The Nord Stream and Other Recent Case Studies

Abstract

The explosions on September 26th, 2022, which damaged the gas pipelines of Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, have highlighted the need and urgency of improving the re- silience of Critical Undersea Infrastructures (CUIs). Comprising gas pipelines and power and communication cables, these con- nect countries worldwide and are critical for the global economy and stability. An attack targeting multiple of such infrastruc- tures simultaneously could potentially cause significant damage and greatly affect various aspects of daily life. Due to the in- creasing number and continuous deployment of CUIs, existing underwater surveillance solutions, such as Autonomous Under- water Vehicles (AUVs) or Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs), are not adequate enough to ensure thorough monitoring.We show that the combination of information from both un- derwater and above-water surveillance sensors enables achieving Seabed-to-Space Situational Awareness (S3A), mainly thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Information Fusion (IF) method- ologies. These are designed to process immense volumes of infor- mation, fused from a variety of sources and generated from mon- itoring a very large number of assets on a daily basis. The learned knowledge can be used to anticipate future behaviors, identify threats, and determine critical situations concerning CUIs.To illustrate the capabilities and importance of S3A, we con- sider three events that occurred in the second half of 2022: the aforementioned Nord Stream explosions, the cutoff of the under- water communication cable SHEFA-2 connecting the Shetland Islands and the UK mainland, and the suspicious activity of a large vessel in the Adriatic Sea. Specifically, we provide analy- ses of the available data, from Automatic Identification System (AIS) and satellite data, integrated with possible contextual in- formation, e.g., bathymetry, Patterns Of Life (POLs), weather conditions, and human intelligence (HUMINT).