Rising sea levels threaten Internet infrastructure

           In a talk to internet network researchers, Ramakrishnan Durairajan, an assistant professor in the computer and information science department at the University of Oregon, warned that most of the damage could come in the next 15 years. Strategies to reduce potential problems should be under consideration sooner rather than later, he says.“Our analysis is conservative in that we only looked at the static dataset of sea level rise and then overlapped that over the infrastructure to get an idea of risk,” Durairajan says.

      “Sea level rise can have other factors—a tsunami, a hurricane, coastal subduction zone earthquakes—all of which could provide additional stresses that could be catastrophic to infrastructure already at risk.”By 2033, the study also found, that more than 1,100 internet traffic hubs will be surrounded by water. New York City and Miami are the other two most susceptible cities, but the impacts could ripple out and potentially disrupt global communications.

          “Most of the damage that’s going to be done in the next 100 years will be done sooner than later,” says the study’s senior author Paul Barford, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was Durairajan’s academic adviser while he completed the study as part of his doctoral work. “That surprised us. The expectation was that we’d have 50 years to plan for it. We don’t have 50 years.”