Shrinking Arctic Ice Redraws the Map For Internet Cable Connections (politico.eu) 14
Thawing ice in the Arctic may open up new routes for internet cables that lie at the bottom of the ocean and carry most international data traffic. And more routes matter when underwater infrastructure is at risk of attack. From a report: Baltic Sea gas and telecoms cables were damaged last year, with a Chinese vessel a potential suspect. Red Sea data cables were cut last month after a Yemeni government warning of attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Over 90 percent of all Europe-Asia traffic flows through the Red Sea route. The problem of critical data relying on only one path is clear. "It's clearly a kind of concentration of several cables, which means that there is a risk that areas will bottleneck," Taneli Vuorinen, the executive vice president at Cinia, a Finland-based company working on an innovative pan-Arctic cable, said.
"In order to meet the increasing demand, there's an increasing pressure to find diversity" of routes, he said. The Far North Fiber project is seeking to offer just that. The 14,500 kilometer long cable will directly link Europe to Japan, via the Northwest Passage in the Arctic, with landing sites in Japan, the United States (Alaska), Canada, Norway, Finland and Ireland. It would have been unthinkable until just a few years ago, when a thick, multiyear layer of ice made navigation impossible. But the Arctic is warming up at a worrying pace with climate change, nearly four times faster than the rest of the world. Sea ice is shrinking by almost 13 percent every decade.
"In order to meet the increasing demand, there's an increasing pressure to find diversity" of routes, he said. The Far North Fiber project is seeking to offer just that. The 14,500 kilometer long cable will directly link Europe to Japan, via the Northwest Passage in the Arctic, with landing sites in Japan, the United States (Alaska), Canada, Norway, Finland and Ireland. It would have been unthinkable until just a few years ago, when a thick, multiyear layer of ice made navigation impossible. But the Arctic is warming up at a worrying pace with climate change, nearly four times faster than the rest of the world. Sea ice is shrinking by almost 13 percent every decade.
Re:Whaaa? (Score:5, Informative)
Not to be a wet blanket, but no investment decisions have been made. If you read the article carefully you will realize that they aren't even to the survey stage yet. What they have done is that they have hit the EU up for 23 million euro in funding.
So far the estimated costs of the project are 1 billion euro, and that's projected to be considerably more costly than non-Arctic routes. So they have a lot of fund raising to do if they want to actually make this happen. And, let's face it, the easy money has already been raised. The EU is more than happy to pay 23 million euro, much of which will end up in Nokia's hands, to study this. Actual business people, spending their own money, are likely to be more skeptical. Especially considering the fact that comparable cable that doesn't take this route would only cost 250 million euros.
This article is really just a fancy advertisement for something that is probably not a good idea. The article actually does a good job of covering that part of the story. You have to read down a ways, but it is worth it. True to form the EU has already invested heavily in this project. I personally think that says more about EU spending than on the viability of the Northwest Passage for fiber optic cables.
If, on the other hand, you felt strongly enough about the direction that the climate was headed on this planet that you wanted to make a big bet on the Northwest Passage becoming a viable route for fiber optic cables, I suspect that their is an opportunity here to put your money where your mouth is. These people are going to need a lot more money than they currently have if this is to get off the drawing board.
Re:Whaaa? (Score:4)
That said, I totally agree with the sentiment that this kind of opportunity is one that, all things considered, might be better if it were not even potentially on the table.
Re: (Score:2)
Keep in mind it doesn't need to be a viable shipping route for the entire year, just long enough to get the cable onto the sea bed at a depth that won't freeze solid and potentially damage the cable. if you're making multiple landfalls then you wouldn't even have to lay the entire cable in one go if time is a concern; you could use the landing stations to splice on the next length prior to laying it once the ice cap has melted again the following spring/summer. It's still very expensive, yes, but for lucrative latency critical stuff like high frequency trading, since when has a high up-front cost been a concern?
That said, I totally agree with the sentiment that this kind of opportunity is one that, all things considered, might be better if it were not even potentially on the table.
It does if you ever need to make a timely repair.
Re: (Score:2)
The article actually does a good job of talking about this. It even mentions recent problems that they had in Alaska with a cable that got cut because the ice got thicker than they thought possible. I actually think that this is a pretty cool idea (pun totally intended), and I am glad to see these guys making 23 million euros to look into it. Good on them for getting paid to study a very interesting problem.
However, I would be surprised if the cable actual got laid, assuming that the current forecasts
Re: Whaaa? (Score:1)
It's time drop the whole denialist bs. It isn't productive and doesn't nothing to try and even get some people to at least listen a little bit to what you have to say. Instead it's puts people off even more.
I guess I'm a denialist too because I live near Lake Erie. At 56, I've experienced the changes in winter where we get less snow now than back in the 70s and 80s. The difference is that I view things in cycles rather than trying to blame everything on man made climate change. Can man effect climate? Sure
Re: (Score:2)
Lastly, I want to see all the unmodified data that climate groups use and let it be peer reviewed by a group of scientists from both sides of debate with no funding from groups with bias interests especially the UN or other such government entities.
"Scientists" doing (data) science aren't going to have sides. They're on the side of the numbers and science. You don't want people from both sides; You want people that won't allow any preconceived notions to impact the science (IE: scientists, like those in the climate groups). People comparing their local weather phenomena to AGW to raise doubts about the science are likely biased and not accounting for the complete dataset.
Any prediction should come with a probability factor. There are so many unpredict
Other risks (Score:4, Insightful)
Scientists predict seasonl ice-free Arctic by 2015 (Score:4, Informative)
From 2008 ...
https://www.theglobeandmail.co... [theglobeandmail.com]
Re: Scientists predict seasonl ice-free Arctic by (Score:1)
Has it happened yet?
Re: (Score:2)
That's not what the study says. That's not even what the scientist said. From your link:
"I now believe that the Arctic will be out of multiyear ice in the summertime as early as 2015; it is coming very quickly," Dr. Barber said.
i.e. he described a lower bound, not an upper bound. Further, even this was only a single scientist's opinion, and the study itself [google.com.au] makes no such claim.
It's amusing how climate deniers love to jump on mangled second- or third-hand reporting, hoping that this somehow discredits the science itself. Meanwhile, the decades of hard evidence keep piling up.
Northwest Passage (Score:2)
I'm a bit surprised they didn't consider this before. I mean, in the past you'd need an icebreaker, but they've been traversing the passage since well before the Internet Age.