Unseen, at the bottom of the Earth’s oceans, are 1.5 million kilometres of cables crucial to the world’s communication networks.  Studies of the abyssal depths are expensive, producing a research shortfall about their impact on an environment already increasingly strangled by plastic pollution. Long term effects on seabed ecosystems and delicate electro-magnetically susceptible species are largely unknown. Transient recycled consumer plastics interpret this ecosystem, resurfacing an environmental issue ‘out of sight, out of mind’.