Philadelphia (CBS) - A new study suggests that rising sea levels due to climate change could put an end to the internet as we know it.
The internet's buried infrastructure, which is 4,000 miles of fiber optic cable, are at significant risk of being damaged by the year
Slight scale issue here - individual cables are longer than that and the aggregate is probably over 1m km - the rest of the world measures this stuff in km :)
The "design life" of a specific cable is ~ 25 years (or possibly that is the time when the initial cable aging guarantees expire)
A map (mainly of the international ones):
Note: cable repairs often take weeks as a ship is involved, so anyone running a reliable service / network on top is likely to want 3 routes to any major node to get to 5 x 9s availability
Finally the Internet is likely to survive significant sea rise, but I suspect some of the locations mentioned will struggle with being below the new sea level - the only ones who take flood protection seriously enough to start working on mitigation seem to be the Dutch...
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