Buried Internet Cables Threatened by Rising Sea Level

Buried internet cables in densely populated coastal regions across the U.S. are now being threatened by rising sea levels, a new study has found.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Oregon have taken a look at the risk factors of climate change and how it may impact the internet and their findings are unsettling.

Within the next 15 years, critical communication infrastructures could be submerged by rising seas, which will cover more than 4,000 miles of buried fiber optic conduit by 2033 while surrounding more than 1,100 traffic hubs.

"So much of the infrastructure that's been deployed is right next to the coast, so it doesn't take much more than a few inches or a foot of sea level rise for it to be underwater," said study coauthor Paul Barford, according to National Geographic.

The impact of having no internet could be far reaching.

BBC recently reported that a fifth of all Americans use the internet "almost constantly" and 73 percent say they use it at least daily.

Businesses also rely on the internet and its collapse could impact them as well as the economy.

For now, the U.S. cities most susceptible to the rising water level are New York, Miami and Seattle however, researchers said in the study that the effects would ripple across the internet and not be confined to these areas.

The study's senior author, Paul Barford, said cities' infrastructure was built 20 to 25 years ago, when "no thought was given to climate change."

The problem is that many of the conduits at risk are already close to sea level and it would take only a slight rise in ocean levels caused by climate change to expose buried fiber optic cables to sea water

And, while buried fiber optic cables are designed to be water-resistant, they are not waterproof.

Barford said that "the first instinct will be to harden the infrastructure" however he noted that keeping the sea at bay was a hard task. "We can probably buy a little time, but in the long run it's just not going to be effective," he said.

"Considering how interconnected everything is these days, protecting the internet is crucial," added Mikhail Chester, the director of the Resilient Infrastructure Laboratory at the University of Arizona, according to National Geographic.

He said the 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."

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