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Study Suggests Buried Internet Infrastructure at Risk as Sea Levels Rise (eurekalert.org)
Thousands of miles of buried fiber optic cable in densely populated coastal regions of the United States may soon be inundated by rising seas, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Oregon. From a report: The study, presented Monday at a meeting of internet network researchers, portrays critical communications infrastructure that could be submerged by rising seas in as soon as 15 years, according to the study's senior author, Paul Barford, a UW-Madison professor of computer science. "Most of the damage that's going to be done in the next 100 years will be done sooner than later," says Barford, an authority on the "physical internet" -- the buried fiber optic cables, data centers, traffic exchanges and termination points that are the nerve centers, arteries and hubs of the vast global information network. "That surprised us. The expectation was that we'd have 50 years to plan for it. We don't have 50 years."
The study, conducted with Barford's former student Ramakrishnan Durairajan, now of the University of Oregon, and Carol Barford, who directs UW-Madison's Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, is the first assessment of risk of climate change to the internet. It suggests that by the year 2033 more than 4,000 miles of buried fiber optic conduit will be underwater and more than 1,100 traffic hubs will be surrounded by water. The most susceptible U.S. cities, according to the report, are New York, Miami and Seattle, but the effects would not be confined to those areas and would ripple across the internet, says Barford, potentially disrupting global communications.
The study, conducted with Barford's former student Ramakrishnan Durairajan, now of the University of Oregon, and Carol Barford, who directs UW-Madison's Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, is the first assessment of risk of climate change to the internet. It suggests that by the year 2033 more than 4,000 miles of buried fiber optic conduit will be underwater and more than 1,100 traffic hubs will be surrounded by water. The most susceptible U.S. cities, according to the report, are New York, Miami and Seattle, but the effects would not be confined to those areas and would ripple across the internet, says Barford, potentially disrupting global communications.
Stuff underground gets wet already, just in case you didn't know about "rain" and such.
Less likely to be cut by a backhoe then ...
Is in no danger. These are some of the stupidest ideas I've seen lately. Its like the world is static to them and one tiny change triggers a "oh noes all is lost!" response
Climate change reporting is so one-sided as to be fake news. Nobody reports on the substantial evidence that volcanic and solar activity fully explain the recent warming. These are natural cycles and aren't anything we should be concerned about. In 20 or 30 years, we'll be talking about global cooling again and see that none of this infrastructure was truly at risk. Now, I'll be censored to -1 for telling it like it is, which is truly unfortunate. A lot of respected scientists like Dr. Bill Gray (the father of seasonal hurricane forecasts) have also stated that humans aren't causing global warming. It's a shame that respected scientists aren't taken seriously because it doesn't fit with the politically expedient narrative.
Underground cables are ALWAYS at risk from any type of water accumulation. Sea level has nothing to do with that risk.
A broken underground pipe can cause the same exact damage as surging water from higher sea level. The risk is from long term water exposure, not sea level.
Why didn't Obama stop this?
Unless we are going to see sea levels rise by a multiple feet in a year I don't see the problem. The sea is rising slowly so there will be plenty of warning before any termination point goes underwater so there is plenty of time to move the termination point to further inland so it's safe(ish) from hurricanes and other issues associated with rising sea levels. Moving the people is going to be a much bigger issue.
Gee...never saw something like this study coming from people at a place like this.
You can pretty much predict the kind of crap they will publish.
I thought the sea levels were already supposed have risen? Lots of doom and gloom predictions based on bad models.
I for one would simply place a bunch of tiny life-vests on cables to keep them happy, you know, just in case.
Specifically, averaging 3.2mm, according to Wikipedia. In 15 years, that's only 48mm (less than 2 inches).
How's that going to flood a bunch of stuff that's not on some coral atoll in the South Pacific?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
If water is going to rise as predicted, the Internet infrastructure may be the least of the problems, especially if New York City is under sea level, unless the subway is converted into an underwater subway system.
2 inches can do a lot, ask you girlfriend- i'm sure she's familiar with that size.
Why didn't Obama stop this?
It's because the Republican controlled Congress stopped him.
Whatever Obama wanted, the Republicans didn't. I bet if Obama tried to make abortion illegal, the Republicans would have said, "no!" just because they were out to ruin his Presidency.
Why?
Because they're constituents wanted it that way.
Why?
Because their constituents couldn't stand a Black man as President. There was no other explanation.
"Didn't like Obama because of his 'policies'"? Suuuuure you did.
It drives me nuts when publications use these relative terms as if we all know what they mean. How much is a "slight" increase in sea level A foot? An Inch? The current yearly rise in sea level is 3.2 mm. That's about 2 inches over 15 years. Is the paper based on this, or a much higher rise?
Numbers matter, and not giving them in the summary borders on dishonesty.
We are fundamentally incapable of long term planning. If we faced a scenario of nothing happening for 50 years and then everything happening at once, we'd be devastated. If things happen throughout the 50 years though, great. It is much easier to handle many little disasters than one big one when you can't plan. It also helps to keep the issue in the public consciousness.
Amsterdam figured it out, and so can New Amsterdam...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Balderdash! The Earth is flat! I mean we didn't come from no smelly monkeys, I mean vaccines cause autism, I mean ... dammit I forgot what was fake, but something is bogus about wet wire claims.
Table-ized A.I.
Maybe they didn't just change it because people liked it better that way.
again. There are and mort1fying 7ormed his own
If water is going to rise as predicted, the Internet infrastructure may be the least of the problems, especially if New York City is under sea level, unless the subway is converted into an underwater subway system.
Well, we have to have our priorities.
How will it affect download speeds and gaming latency? That's what I want to know ...
Having just 2 inches is not something to brag about.
Look, if sea levels rise a couple of feet, this affects the cable repeaters and the landing approaches. A couple of feet may impact whether a six foot raised building is viable, because it's now four foot, and the wave action is likely to wash away the support structures. Some cable landings may have been built on promontories that could be reached by roads which now get washed away, and the storm impacts can cause other problems.
(caveat: not at that UW)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
We're all going to DIE!!! Global Warming!!!! Pestilence!!! DONALD FUCKING TRUMP!!!! OOOOOOMMMMMFFFFGGGGG!!!
At Risk as Sea Lies Rise. Not long ago they were lying about the poles almost being melted. It is unfortunate how easily people can be deceived today. The lack of religion has made it easy for the devil and his hordes of following demons to deceive the masses, especially millennial. They can't see who is behind their fervent hatred of anyone who is a 'global warming denier'. There are many older wiser people out here who can see through this lie and refuse to be duped by it. What but the devil and demons could induce such hostility over a disagreement.
sigh. you obviously havent done much infrastructure planning if you dont know the difference between water resistant and water proof. from TFA:
Plus there is the whole "there is nothing worse for equipment than seawater" thing, which if you had ever maintained anything around an ocean, you would be very aware of.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Yes with only two inches, she has already moved her hole to another location just as substations will have to do.
Apparently what is needed is MORE sea level rise. Or maybe a thicker sea.
We will have to adjust....
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Having just 2 inches is not something to brag about.
On the other hand, if you have 2 more inches, that could make a lot different!
I dunno. Some people like it that wide.
The cables will be out of date, or even non functioning by the time seal levels rise enough to effect them. Or they will be replaced with water proof cables by then. SMH
Station long lines of progressive slutlings to hoist-high the cabling. From Maine to Daytona. As the water rises balance one chirping slut atop another . Cable dry, Bezos income rages while hordes of progressives drown ... try to get a few migrant children into that line ... every emergency needs to be exploited ... what more can we ask for/ ?
How about you?
From the article: "Buried fiber optic cables are designed to be water-resistant, but unlike the marine cables that ferry data from continent to continent under the ocean, they are not waterproof."
We should just get the Dutch to build the Internet infrastructure.
Anyone could build infrastructure that can survive being submerged, Unfortunately, they didn't plan for that: "When it was built 20-25 years ago, no thought was given to climate change."
What a bunch of bullshit. If there is a certainty of sea level rise wiping out large population centers if we don't do anything about CO2 output then I'd think we could take on some risk to avert it. What kind of risk? Building nuclear reactors kind of risk.
Has anyone done a risk analysis on using nuclear power? It turns out lots of people have. We find that nuclear power is the safest energy source we have. How can that be? Because a nuclear power plant can produce 1.21 GW of electricity with a capacity factor exceeding 90% for close to 80 years and very few people are killed or injured. Compare this to wind, solar, and hydro which have a capacity factors around 35% and people still die from industrial accidents in building and maintaining them. Comparing total energy out to people dead means fewer people dead from nuclear power than anything we know of.
They claim certainty of a many people dead in a global warming induced event and compare that to the risk of a nuclear power accident. If the global warming means 100% that people die then whatever risk nuclear power has must be lower than that.
I'm thinking that since the people in government are not issuing licenses to build more nuclear power that they know global warming is bullshit, they are suicidal (because DC is at "certainty" of being under water), or they are so lacking in intelligence to understand some basic fucking math.
If global warming is a problem then do something to fix it. If it's not a problem then at some point people will realize this and the scare mongering will have no effect. I left that scare mongering behind years ago. Now I'm simply pissed at being lied to over and over again.
I need a drink.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Oh, wait.
Do you have ESP?
Unless the "study" was just another "sky is falling" AGW horror story the authors should republish when they have definite proof that has undergone peer review with folks other than those at RealClimate, or who make a living off of Federally funded grants.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Specifically, averaging 3.2mm, according to Wikipedia. In 15 years, that's only 48mm (less than 2 inches).
How's that going to flood a bunch of stuff that's not on some coral atoll in the South Pacific?
How Indeed!
Lunar and solar tides produce variations orders of magnitude larger than that daily. Three millimeters is below the grass of measurement noise from satellite data or floating buoys.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I can do basic math, 2033 is 15 years. Why does that matter? Anyone who has read "Scientific" news for any length of time knows when you need to pick a bullshit arbitrary time frame people pick 10 to 15 years, it's that wonderful convergence near enough to get immediate funding but far enough that it's actually impossible to prove it won't happen.
Engineers in New York City and Seattle probably...
We have more than your hunch to go on. The study referenced in the article suggests that "by the year 2033 more than 4,000 miles of buried fiber optic conduit will be underwater and more than 1,100 traffic hubs will be surrounded by water. "
Relocating Internet infrastructure is a small problem compared to relocating billion of people that live near the sea.
Even in the US, where there is a lot of inhabited land inside the country, that would cost a lot. Who will pay?
"Most of the damage that's going to be done in the next 100 years will be done sooner than later"
Based on my very rudimentary knowledge of global warming, exponential curves, runaway effects and what have you. That statement is entirely false?
Also a bit of a scare article. I assume it's implying the 'data sheds' where massive undersea lines terminate are close to the sea (they likely are!) but moving these are probably very very small scale problems in comparison to other issues if the sea rises the distance required to submerge them.
Global warming is bad, how can we tie it to the internet!!!?
After all, itâ(TM)s PROVEN they are to blame for Trump, Clinton, Obama, Bush Jr and Australia!!!
It's Ok. There is no AGW so this will not happen. :-)
Florida will not be submerged either.
New Zealanders are well balanced with a chip on each shoulder. One represents Australia, the other the rest of the world
How long have these supposedly vulnerable cables been in place? The Internet didn't exist before the 1990s. (I know, youngsters, the ARPANet existed earlier, in fact I was using it in the late 1980s. But I'm referring to the modern network that's grown by leaps and bounds.)
I'd bet these vulnerable cables were put in place in the last couple decades at most, probably 15 years ago. And if they can be placed that quickly, then they can be replaced with newer ones over the next 15 years, a few inches (at least) higher, and we won't have to worry for a few more decades.
There, that was easy!
Why did they not plan for this?
Halt the presses - some cables may need to be replaced
Nobody's concerned about normal waves hitting coasts 2 inches higher up. What does concern them is how the rise affects the more extreme events; coastal floods from king tides and storm surges are getting worse, and more frequent - unusually high floods that only happened once a century (1% chance) are now happening once a decade (10% chance).
These floods don't just inundate streets and underground cables, they can contaminate coastal wetlands, aquifers, and farmland with salt. In flat coastal deltas, a small rise in flood levels can extend a much longer way inland, salting the ground and the water table for miles and affecting the livelihoods of many - particularly in poorer countries with large populations depending on once-fertile river deltas. This is a very real problem for many countries without the funds to relocate farms and farmers, especially those like Bangladesh.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
"Study Suggests Buried Internet Infrastructure ar Risk From More Frequent High Floods" would be a much more interesting and uncontroversial paper...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Except recently it's been rising and is accelerating.
That graph looks scary until you look at the scales, and translate milimeters to inches.
It shows the sea level rising by 2 inches in the last century. It also looks very slightly bent up near the end.
Now how you get a error bands of less than +- 1/6 inch when measuring sea level beats me. But let's assume their methodology works. And lets be generous and assume that bend is an exponential. It's a pretty small bend, so let's be REALLY generous and say that the extrapolated next two inches happen in 50 years rather than 100.
So a 2 inch sea level rise in 50 years will flood out the Internet in 10? It only takes (substantially less than) 2/5 of an inch of sea level rise to do it?
I think we need a MUCH scarier graph to support this panic.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
In 15 years all those slow hard to maintain cables will be replaced with a mesh of super high speed wireless mounted on roof tops.
They will not even be worth digging up.
As usual the socialist AGW scare monger crowd has come up with another silly sky is falling faux-science study to frighten us into giving them power.
Go away, Marxists. You are stupid and boring. Your 19th century eco-political theories have been proven utterly wrong.
The EurekAlert article linked from the post shows a map of inundated areas in New York City, specifically labelled as showing sea level rise by 2033. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-07/uow-ssb071218.php
Comparing that to the NOAA interactive Sea Level Rise map referenced as the source of THAT map in the article, it appears the "mean higher high water" sea level would need to be 6 feet higher to show the same flooded area. https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/#/layer/slr/6/-8235939.482246331/4977994.75073332/12/satellite/none/0.8/2050/interHigh/midAccretion
Now I suppose something drastic could happen by 2033 - every bit of Antarctic and greenland ice sliding into the sea? But it seems a bit too unlikely a projection to be raising a fuss about the internet being destroyed (yet again) by then.
"Study Suggests Buried Internet Infrastructure ar Risk From More Frequent High Floods" would be a much more interesting and uncontroversial paper...
So changing the headline suddenly makes the paper more interesting? How does that work. If a higher sea level leads to more flooding which leads to higher water table then the original headline is still accurate. Just because you originaly didn't understand how it works doesn't make the headline wrong.
The Republicans in congress are wimpy idiots who never stopped Obama on ANYTHING.
Consider:
a: In 2008 when he won the White House, Obama strode into a Washington DC where the Democrats controlled BOTH the US House and the US Senate by super-majorities. Obama and the Democrats were free to do ANYTHING with no input from Republicans. When the voters of Mass put Scott Brown into Ted Kennedy's senate seat, the Democrats lost their super-majority (in the Senate only) but still had a large majority so they just changed the rules so that they could pass Obamacare over the objections of Scott Brown, effectively keeping 99% of the benefit of a super majority.
b: When the Republicans took over the House and got into a budget fight with Obama, he shut down the national parks and war memorials and so completely spooked the House leaders that they caved-in and made deals with him for the entire remainder of his time in office that full-funded everything he was doing, including Planned Parenthood, and Obamacare.
c: When the Republicans got control of the Senate, they did it with RINOS who nearly always side with Democrats rather than their fellow Republicans. These dishonest morons went along with the panicky House leaders in funding every damned thing Obama wanted.
Simply put, while you can easily find things Democrats CHOSE not to do while Obama was in office (but which they tell their base voters were "blocked by Republicans") you cannot actually find anything where the congressional record proves that the Republicans actually did stop it. Many of Obama's legacy items are being undone by Trump because Obama did them by executive order rather than by laws passed by congress - not because Republicans stopped him but because he did not want vulnerable Democrats to have to vote on the stuff or he even feared they might not, in an effort to save their own political skin. As a result, most of his policies never went for a vote in congress and we do not even know if the Republicans could have stopped them even presuming they had suddenly grown some political spines.
The desperate desire of the Republican establishment to drop their drawers and bend over for Obama was the primary reason no establishment Republican could get enough Republican voters to support them in the attempt to beat Trump to the nomination of the party in 2016. Republican voters spent 8 long years watching Obama do tons of crap they hated and their own party leaders shockingly refusing take any substantive step to stop Obama, and usually not even publicly challenging him. Event today, the very same RINO Republicans who are joining Democrats at freaking-out over Trump's refusal to spit in Putin's eye at the summit in Finland, have never been on record attacking Obama for having a commie supporter as CIA head for 4 years (Brennan, who registers as independent but has often identified as and voted communist but now regularly accuses Trump of treason). The RINO treatment of Brennan is interesting because RINOs usually do not care about social issues and generally posture as hyper-anti-communists.
I wonder what these researchers are going to say in 15 years when none of this happens?... Of course all of Al Gore's predictions have failed to materialize but people still believe that idiot.
Which thing is not the fault in the environment, but at fault with the characteristics of submarine fiber optics when they were selected for this application. Of course, if you have optical fiber that can tolerate the environment miles under the ocean, even an increase of hundreds of feet is not going to be a factor. Having experience in fiber optics manufacturing, I would call this "fake news."