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Despite claims to the contrary, climate change is real. Climate change will break critical parts of the Internet within 20 years. That is what a study by Paul Barford, a University of Wisconsin, Madison professor of computer science predicts.

Professor Barford presented his findings at IETF 102. IETF 102 was a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force,  Association for Computing Machinery, the Internet Society, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Montreal. The study, “Lights Out: Climate Change Risk to Internet Infrastructure,” found that critical communications infrastructure could be submerged by rising seas in as soon as 15 years.

Conventional copper and fiber optic cables

Companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Cable and Wireless go through enormous costs and efforts to protect undersea cable spanning the continents but once that cable hits the shore it gets converted to conventional cables. The conventional copper and fiber optic cables buried decades ago, carry the signals from the landing points to the interior are not designed to withstand the inundation by saltwater caused by climate change.

Popular Science reports that Professor Barford’s research found that climate change will impact more than 4,000 miles of buried fiber optic conduit. These conduits and internet cables will most likely be underwater and become inoperable due to exposure to damaging saltwater. Saltwater causes damage to the cables which reduces their ability to send signals. The cable landing stations where undersea cables connect the U.S. Internet to the rest of the world will also be vulnerable. The study also predicts that water will surround over 1,100 traffic hubs.

Major interruptions

Mr. Barford told Popular Science that this service interruption is likely to become a growing problem within the next 15 years. He warned that communications companies should begin implementing protective measures and solutions soon if they want to avoid major interruptions in the near future.

“Most of the damage that’s going to be done in the next 100 years will be done sooner than later,” says Dr. Barford, the keeper of the Internet Atlas, a comprehensive repository of 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.” He also notes “The landing points are all going to be underwater in a short period of time.”

The study is the first risk assessment of the impact of climate change on the U.S. infrastructure of the Internet. It reports that Miami, New York, and Seattle are among the areas where connectivity could be most affected. The Internet in these cities is at risk because cables carrying it tend to converge on a few fiber optic strands that lead to large population centers.

But the effects of climate changes would not be confined to those areas and would ripple across the Internet, potentially disrupting global communications. Many of the conduits at risk are already close to sea level and only a slight rise in ocean levels due to melting polar ice and thermal expansion will expose buried fiber optic cables to seawater.

No thought was given to climate change

Much of the infrastructure at risk is buried and follows long-established rights of way, typically paralleling highways and coastlines. The roots of the danger emerged inadvertently during the Internet’s rapid growth in the 1980s before there was widespread awareness of the Internet as a global grid or the massive threats of climate change. Professor Barford says, “When it was built 20-25 years ago, no thought was given to climate change.”

To reach this conclusion, the team combined data from the Internet Atlas and projections of sea level incursion from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Science Daily says the findings of the study, serve notice to industry and government. “This is a wake-up call. We need to be thinking about how to address this issue.“Mikhail Chester, the director of the Resilient Infrastructure Laboratory at the University of Arizona told National Geographic, This new study “reinforces this idea that we need to be really cognizant of all these systems because they’re going to take a long time to upgrade.”

ISP responses to climate change

The impact of mitigation such as sea walls, according to the study, is difficult to predict. “The first instinct will be to harden the infrastructure,” Professor Barford says. “But keeping the sea at bay is hard. We can probably buy a little time, but in the long run, it’s just not going to be effective.”

The study called individual internet service providers. They found finding that AT&T (T), Verizon (VZ), and CenturyLink (CTL), at most risk. In response, AT&T spokesman Jeff Kobs told NPR,

AT&T uses fiber optic cable “designed for use in coastal areas as well as being submerged in either salt- or fresh-water conditions,… In certain locations where cabling will be submerged for long periods of time or consistently exposed, such as beaches or in subways, we use submarine underwater cabling.

Verizon spokeswoman Karen Schulz told NPR,

After Sandy, we started upgrading our network in earnest, and replacing our copper assets with fiber assets … Copper is impacted by water, whereas fiber is not. We’ve switched significant amounts of our network from copper to fiber in the Northeast.

She explained that Verizon’s focus on flood risk

really has less to do with sea-level change and more to do with general flooding concerns … For cable landing stations that are very close to the oceans and that have undersea cables, we specifically assess sea-level changes.

A representative of CenturyLink told Popular Mechanics they can handle the problem. The company’s PR rep said that CenturyLink networks are designed with redundancy and can divert traffic to alternate routes when infrastructure goes down.

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The Verizon and CenturyLink responses seem to totally miss the point.

The impact of large-scale Internet failures goes beyond Facebook and iTunes. The failure of the Internet would disrupt many real people’s day-to-day services like online banking, traffic signals, and railroad routing; the sharing of medical records among doctors and hospitals, and the growing “internet of things” that includes household appliances to regional grids of electric power production and transmission.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.