# AGENTS.md - Submarine cable areas

Guidance for AI agents and LLMs working with this collection.

## Overview

The general footprint of commercial and research submarine cables in U.S. waters as 2,816 areas (polygons; the first-15 list calls them lines). A cable area may hold one or more cables; most records carry no cable name (`shortname`, `cablesystem`, `owner` mostly empty), so names fall back to a generic label plus the source OBJECTID, which is the id. The native `status` (In Service, ...) is empty for 2,411 records, so `status` is 'charted'.

Licence CC-PDDC; credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Office for Coastal Management (OCM), via MarineCadastre.gov. Public domain. Processed by Ocean Metrics.

## Find a place

```sql
SELECT * FROM read_parquet('https://storage.oceanmetrics.io/gazetteer/noaa_submarine_cables/places.parquet')
WHERE name ILIKE '%california%';
```

`place_id` is unique and prefixed; `status` / `status_source` / `status_date` say whether the place is current and
where that is documented. Check `status` before treating a lease or area as live.

## Render on a map

Load `places.pmtiles` (layer `noaa_submarine_cables`) into MapLibre GL via the PMTiles protocol; `styles/default.json` is a starting style.