*A lot of the Internet is already underwater (because it's in cables, silly), but the places where those cables meet the land, well, they're at the rising shoreline.
*How will people dead with this? By lying about it, probably.
Why is Motherboard telling us this instead of Google Apple Facebook Amazon and Microsoft
(...)
Barford and his co-authors—University of Oregon computer scientist Ramakrishnan Durairajan and Carol Barford, director of UW-Madison's Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment—reached this conclusion by combining two important datasets for the first time.
By overlaying the Internet Atlas, a global map of the internet’s physical infrastructure, with the Sea Level Rise Inundation estimates generated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the team was able to pinpoint where the most at-risk hardware is located.
“A gigantic amount of information is carried to and from the U.S. and the rest of the world every day,” Barford told me. “In the most extreme case, [rising sea levels] will cause global disruptions until the landing sites can be moved to higher ground. The good news is that there are a relatively limited number of these sites so addressing this risk has a limited scope and costs. After that, it's much more difficult to predict global impact—that is a subject of our ongoing work.”
One of the study’s most alarming findings is the short lead time before major communication lines will be affected. The team found that in the U.S. alone, 1,186 miles of long-haul fiber conduit and 2,429 miles of metro fiber conduit will be submerged by rising seas within the next 15 years....
