The growth of global Internet traffic has driven a drastic expansion of the submarine cable network, both in terms of the sheer number of links and its total capacity. Today, a complex mesh of hundreds of cables, stretching over one million kilometres, connects nearly every corner of the earth and is instrumental in closing the remaining connectivity gaps. Despite the scale and critical role of the submarine network for both business and society at large, our community has mostly ignored it, treating it as a black box in most Internet studies, from connectivity to inter-domain traffic and reliability.