FEMALE_1: So Alison, can you explain what Internet is?

Alison: When you think about the Internet,

Alison: do you picture something like this?

Alison: [MUSIC] This is technically the web.

MALE_1: The internet is a series of tubes.

MALE_2: These are the tubes that are

MALE_2: today's underground superhighways of communication.

Alison: The Internet is the physical stuff

Alison: that makes the web work.

Alison: A series of cables and routers,

Alison: daisy-chain together to form a worldwide network.

Alison: As critical as that network is to

Alison: our lives, it's surprisingly vulnerable.

Alison: New research projects that as sea levels rise,

Alison: the Internet could drown.

Alison: [NOISE].

Alison: From highways to railroads

Alison: and the telegraph to the telephone,

Alison: our infrastructure follows people.

Alison: The Internet followed a similar pattern.

Alison: We laid a lot of the cables

Alison: along existing roads and tunnels,

Alison: which puts much of it right along the coast.

Alison: Researchers at the University of Oregon

Alison: and the University of Wisconsin,

Alison: mapped the physical infrastructure

Alison: of the Internet and then

Alison: overlaid that map with

Alison: the latest projections for sea level rise.

Alison: When you look at their maps you can see that

Alison: just a one foot rise in sea level threatens

Alison: thousands of miles of these cables

Alison: and hundreds of critical connecting points.

Alison: That's enough to wipe out New York City's internet.

Alison: The researchers were surprised

Alison: by how quickly this could all happen,

Alison: in as soon 15 years.

Alison: Cities like New York,

Alison: Miami and Seattle have a lot of

Alison: this critical infrastructure

Alison: and they're right by the coast.

Alison: Because of the way the Internet is physically laid out,

Alison: an outage in New York could

Alison: cause problems around the world.

Alison: The Internet's a network of networks,

Alison: kind of like a subway system

Alison: with local and express lines.

Alison: So, when you send an e-mail,

Alison: that data gets transformed into

Alison: pulses of light and those pulses get

Alison: beamed through cables until they reach

Alison: the recipient at the final destination.

Alison: The light pulses start out on

Alison: what we can think of as the local line,

Alison: from your house to

Alison: the cable company's box down the street.

Alison: That's where all of your neighbors connections joined up,

Alison: and then that line connects to a bigger regional hub.

Alison: These are Internet exchanges.

Alison: Places where the cables from lots of

Alison: different networks and providers physically connect

Alison: to the long distance cables that run for

Alison: hundreds of miles to other Internet exchanges,

Alison: where they connect to other local networks and on and on.

Alison: So, these Internet exchanges,

Alison: are where your email transfers to the express line.

Alison: Think of it like Grand Central Station.

Alison: You can imagine the fallout

Alison: if a connection like that were to fail.

Alison: Without the Internet you can't take money out of

Alison: ATMs or pay for anything with a credit card.

Alison: Grocery stores have trouble checking

Alison: their inventory and ordering more food,

Alison: hospitals can't keep track of

Alison: patient records and Wall Street can't function.

Alison: This doesn't mean we're doomed to a life

Alison: in a watery internet less healthscape.

Alison: In 2012, floods from Hurricane Sandy wiped

Alison: out Internet to neighborhoods in

Alison: Manhattan and the Rockaways,

Alison: and some of those outages lasted for weeks.

Alison: The same thing happened in Miami last year after

Alison: Hurricane Irma. It was a wake-up call.

Alison: New York City formed a Resiliency Council to study how to

Alison: shore up its infrastructure

Alison: against storms and rising seas.

Alison: The city is looking to build in

Alison: redundant conduits and fortify what already exists.

Alison: Miami is taking similar steps.

Alison: Verizon which suffered catastrophic flooding

Alison: at its critical facilities during

Alison: Sandy began replacing copper wiring with

Alison: new more resilient fiber optic cable,

Alison: and started moving equipment from

Alison: basements to higher floors.

Alison: The research team behind the study,

Alison: points out that another solution

Alison: could be to simply re-route Internet traffic,

Alison: by passing flooded points.

Alison: The researchers also say whatever we decide to do,

Alison: we'd better get on it,

Alison: sooner rather than later.

Alison: [MUSIC].

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