Lights Out: Climate Change Risk to Internet
Infrastructure
Ramakrishnan Durairajan† , Carol Barford+ , Paul Barford+
of Oregon, + University of Wisconsin - Madison

† University

ABSTRACT

1

INTRODUCTION

Climate change is perhaps the most significant problem facing humanity. The dramatic rise in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere over the past 100 years is causing
changes in weather patterns including increased likelihood
of severe storms as well as rapid rise in sea levels due to melting polar ice caps and thermal expansion of seawater [27].
These phenomena have important implications for the planet
and the effects are already being felt in many areas [36].
To understand and prepare for the impacts of climate
change, a number of models have been developed to project
average sea level rise. The models are based on a variety of
empirical parameters including sea level rise over the past
100 years and the geographic features of coastal areas. The
models predict significant incursions on coastal areas that
imply displacement of large human populations. In response,
some of the threatened areas are already preparing mitigation plans [37], but holding back the oceans is a formidable
undertaking to say the least.
With significant sea level rise predicted, it is important
to assess the threat to communication infrastructure. An
indication of the potential impacts are the storm surges of
major hurricanes such as Katrina and Sandy that devastated
communication systems [21, 30]. While the standard buried
fiber conduits are designed to be water and weather resistant,
most of the deployed conduits are not designed to be under
water permanently.
In this paper, we make a preliminary analysis of the risks
of climate change on Internet infrastructure. The goal of
our work is to understand risks and potential impacts over
timescales of decades, which is consistent with other work
on climate change [11]. Our specific interest in this paper
is assessing how the rise in sea levels threatens buried fiber
conduits and termination points (e.g., colocation facilities,
point of presences (POPs), etc.) in coastal areas in the US.
Our analysis is conservative since it does not consider the
threat of severe storms that would cause temporary sea level
incursions beyond the predicted average. Our analysis also
does not consider any efforts to harden or fortify communication infrastructure since we argue that this will only be
feasible in relatively small geographic areas.
Our study is based on analysis of two data sets. The first
is the communication fiber conduit and termination point
data in Internet Atlas [24]. The Atlas repository includes

In this paper we consider the risks to Internet infrastructure
in the US due to sea level rise. Our study is based on sea
level incursion projections from the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) [12] and Internet infrastructure deployment data from Internet Atlas [24]. We
align the data formats and assess risks in terms of the amount
and type of infrastructure that will be under water in different time intervals over the next 100 years. We find that
4,067 miles of fiber conduit will be under water and 1,101
nodes (e.g., points of presence and colocation centers) will
be surrounded by water in the next 15 years. We further
quantify the risks of sea level rise by defining a metric that
considers the combination of geographic scope and Internet
infrastructure density. We use this metric to examine different regions and find that the New York, Miami, and Seattle
metropolitan areas are at highest risk. We also quantify the
risks to individual service provider infrastructures and find
that CenturyLink, Inteliquent, and AT&T are at highest risk.
While it is difficult to project the impact of countermeasures
such as sea walls, our results suggest the urgency of developing mitigation strategies and alternative infrastructure
deployments.

CCS CONCEPTS
• Networks → Physical links; Network measurement;

KEYWORDS
Physical Internet infrastructure, climate change, sea level
rise, critical infrastructure, risks

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© 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5585-8/18/07. . . $15.00
https://doi.org/10.1145/3232755.3232775
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Durairajan et al.

geocoded maps of over 1500 networks from around the world.
The second is the Sea Level Rise Inundation (SLRI) data from
NOAA’s Digital Coast project [14]. This diverse dataset includes a collection of geo-based sea level rise projections for
the US over the next century. We fuse the Atlas and SLRI
datasets by translating them into a consistent shape format,
and then analyze how sea levels will overlap communication
infrastructure over successive time periods.
The results of our analysis show that climate changerelated sea level incursions could have a devastating impact
on Internet communication infrastructure even in the relatively short term. In particular, we find that 1,186 miles of
long-haul fiber conduit and 2,429 miles of metro fiber conduit will be underwater in the next 15 years. Similarly, we
find that 1,101 termination points will be surrounded by sea
water in the next 15 years. Given the fact that most fiber conduit is underground, we expect the effects of sea level rise
could be felt well before the 15 year horizon. Interestingly,
we find that the risks over longer time scales do not increase
significantly. Specifically, there is only a modest increase in
the amount of additional Internet infrastructure that will be
under water at the 6 ft. rise level (the 100 year projection) vs.
the 1 ft. rise level (the 15 year prediction).
To assess the risk of sea level incursions in specific geographic areas, we define the Coastal Infrastructure Risk (CIR)
metric that considers the combination of geographic scope
and Internet infrastructure density. We use the CIR metric
to examine coastal regions in the US with high population
density. Our results show that communication infrastructure
in New York, Miami, and Seattle, respectively, are at highest risk. We also quantify the impact to individual service
providers and find that CenturyLink, Intelliquent (formerly
Tinet), and AT&T are at highest risk. These results highlight
where developing mitigation strategies and planning alternative deployments should begin in order to preserve both
local and long haul assets.

2

retrospective analysis on the impact of hurricanes [21, 30],
earthquakes [20] and severe storms [34]. Eriksson et al. examine infrastructure risks associated with a variety of natural
disaster types and describe layer 3 techniques for mitigating
these risks in [25]. That study differs from ours in that it
does not consider climate change-related sea rise as a risk.
To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first study of the
effects of climate change-related sea level rise on Internet
infrastructure. However, anecdotal evidence for impact of
global warming on communication infrastructure can be
found in the popular press. For example, Bogle describes
shutdown of communication systems due to air conditioning
failures caused by extreme heat in [19]. That article also
outlines a variety of climate change-related risks but does
not mention sea level rise specifically.

3

ASSESSING CLIMATE
CHANGE-RELATED RISKS
3.1 Sea Level Rise and Internet
Infrastructure

Optical fiber strands that carry Internet traffic between colocation facilities are typically packaged inside of semi-rigid
polyethylene (PE) conduits that range in diameter from 1
to 6 in (larger diameter conduits carry more fiber strands).
The PE conduits provide a measure of protection from different levels of mechanical damage (i.e., being crushed or
cut). Armored cladded conduits are available for use in hostile environments e.g., undersea deployment. PE conduits
containing fiber strands are typically deployed between colocation facilities and POPs in buried trenches (depth varies) or
other underground conduits along routes that often follow
roads and rail lines [23].1
Water, humidity and ice have long been recognized as
threats to fiber optic strands and conduit [17]. Water-related
threats include (i) signal attenuation due to water molecules
embedding in fiber micro-cracks, (ii) corrosion damage to
connectors, (iii) signal loss in optical-electrical-optical connections, and (iv) fiber breakage due to freezing. Cable construction techniques (e.g., cladding and hydrophobic gels)
along with careful deployments enable fiber to function for
decades under normal/expected environmental conditions.
The starting point for our work is that while standard Internet infrastructure deployments are designed to be weather
and water resistant, they are not designed to be surrounded
by or under water. Thus, we posit the following risks due to
sea level rise. The first is physical damage at certain nodes
(e.g., submarine cable landing stations) and at termination
points (i.e., colocation facilities and POPs). A majority of the

RELATED WORK

Climate change and its effects on the planet have been the focus of many prior research efforts. Such studies include monitoring of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations [9, 18],
modeling and analysis of the consequences of global warming including rising sea levels [26, 29], impacts on food production [33] and air quality [28], risk of natural disasters [36]
and other direct threats to human populations [31], as well
as disruption of ecosystems, energy consumption patterns
and water resources [35]. Finally, there has been significant
focus on policy tools to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in
order to mitigate the effects of climate change [4, 13]. These
studies serve as a foundation for our work.
Prior work on the impact of natural disasters on communication infrastructure is related to our study. Examples include

1 Last

mile fiber-to-the-home may be deployed above ground, but we do not
consider those deployments in this study.

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cable landing stations are near a tidally active region and terminate at the nearest colocation facility [8]. Potential effects
include physical damage via tidal inundation and corrosion
leading to signal loss. Second, buried conduits will become
submerged, which will expose them continuously to all of
the threats mentioned above, and the possibility of physical
damage due to exposure caused by tides and storms. The
fact that a great deal of conduit infrastructure was deployed
over the past twenty years and is aging means that all seals
and cladding are likely to be more vulnerable to damage,
especially if they are under water.

infrastructure. Figure 1 depicts the overlap of Internet infrastructure with seawater in four major areas in the US as
a result of a 1 ft. rise in sea level, which is projected over
the next 15 years. The figure highlights the potential for
dramatic impact on Internet infrastructure due to climate
change-related sea level rise. We quantify these effects using
several different metrics in §3.3.

3.2

Datasets

Internet Infrastructure. In this study, we use the physical
topology data from the Internet Atlas project [24]. Internet
Atlas is a visualization and analysis portal built on top of a
Geographic Information System (GIS). The Atlas repository
contains geocoded physical infrastructure data of over 1500
Internet service providers (ISPs) around the world. The data
for each ISP includes (i) node locations (e.g., colocation facilities, POPs and data centers), (ii) conduits/link locations
(e.g., long-haul, metro and submarine conduits) that connect
these nodes, and (iii) relevant meta data (e.g., source provenance). To facilitate our analyses, we used the following
information from Internet Atlas: (a) Nodes located in the
US including Internet exchange points (IXPs), data centers,
colocation facilities and submarine cable landing stations
(or simply, landing stations); (b) Links in the US including
long-haul and metro fiber conduits and submarine cables.
Sea Level Rise Projections. We obtain the Sea Level Rise
Inundation (SLRI) data [14] from the Digital Coast project,
which is managed by NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management [2]. This dataset is a collection of projected sea level
rise scenarios, flood exposures, and affected coastal counties,
and is amassed from a number of partner organizations [3].
Specifically, we use the GIS-based projected sea level rise
scenarios, with scenarios covering the whole range of predictions from 1 to 6 feet in this study, which span the next
century.
Table 1: Timeline of projected Global Mean Sea Level
Rise. Data is based off of “Highest" (i.e., most extreme)
projections.
Year
2030
Projected rise (ft)
1

2045
2

2060
3

2075
4

2090
5

3.3

Infrastructure Inundation Analysis

3.4

Results

We use overlap models to capture and analyze the risks of
climate change-related sea level rise on the Internet infrastructure (§3.1). Specifically, we develop metrics based on the
datasets described in §3.2 to understand where and the extend to which Internet infrastructure will be surrounded by
water or submerged. We augment these risk models with a
temporal component (Table 1) based on the projected Highest
Mean Sea Level Rise scenario described in NOAA’s climate
assessment report [32, Figure 10]. This scenario is recommended by the NOAA report as the most appropriate for
situations with low risk-tolerance, such as deployment of
new infrastructure with a long anticipated life.
We project geographic areas from SLRI data on top of node
and link locations to reveal infrastructure inundation risks.
To localize overlap we develop a Coastal Infrastructure Risk
(CIR) metric that highlights the concentration of Internet
infrastructure per geographic location (e.g., city). The CIR
metric will be used to elucidate the impact of sea level rise
on Internet assets temporally. Using CIR, we identify the top
10 major geographic locations most at risk, and thus in need
of action by municipalities and service providers to secure
existing deployments and plan for new deployments.
Implementation. We use the overlap capability in ArcGIS [6] to implement the three infrastructure analysis models. In particular, after layering the two GIS-based datasets,
we first issue spatial query on the combined layers to calculate the number of nodes and length of fiber cables (in miles)
that will be under seawater for every sea level rise scenario
for every city in SLRI data. Next, to calculate the CIR metric,
we use the kernel density tool [7] in ArcGIS and obtain the
output raster, which is a floating point value that highlights
the top affected areas. We sort the floating point values in
descending order and identify cities with highest risk.

2100
6

Infrastructure Overlap with Seawater. We quantify the
raw number of nodes and fiber conduit miles at risk using
the overlap models described in §3.3. Figure 2 depicts the raw
of number of POPs, data centers, IXPs and landing stations
overlapping with the projected sea level rise scenarios (Table 1). In 2030, about 771 POPs, 235 data centers, 53 landing
stations, 42 IXPs will be affected by a 1 ft. rise in sea level.
Interestingly, the number of vulnerable landing stations and
IXPs are constant throughout the graph, despite the rise from

To fuse the datasets, we had to reconcile the different geographic projections used in these GIS-based repositories. To
tackle this issue, we align the two geographic projections using the projection and transformation tool from ESRI ArcGIS
data management toolbox [5]. This step is complicated by
the size and varying shape formats of the two GIS datasets.
Once resolved, we were able to visualize and analyze the
overlap of projected average sea level with current internet
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Durairajan et al.

Figure 1: Overlap of Internet infrastructure based on 1 ft average sea level rise in North-Western US (top-left),
North-Eastern US (top-right), Los Angeles (bottom-left) and Florida (bottom-right). SLRI is shown in blue (in
green background). Submarine landing stations, POPs, Data centers and IXPs are depicted in red, green, black and
yellow dots respectively. Submarine, metro and long-haul fiber-optic cables/conduits are shown in red, green and
black lines respectively. Infrastructure in the SLRI-unaffected areas is greyed out.
Table 2: Top 5 cities with high climate change risk index for node assets along with the count of nodes.
City (POPs)
New York, NY (46)
Miami, FL (31)
Seattle, WA (28)
Houston, TX (26)
Washington, D.C. (23)

City (Data centers)
New York, NY (43)
Newark, NJ (21)
Seattle, WA (16)
Miami, FL (15)
Palo Alto, CA (8)

City (IXPs)
New York, NY (8)
Miami, FL (4)
San Francisco, CA (4)
Seattle, WA (4)
Houston, TX (3)

1 to 6 ft. over the next century. This is due to the limited
number of entry/exit landing stations to/from different continents and their corresponding colocation facilities where
the landing stations terminate. In contrast, the risk to the
POPs and data centers near the coastal regions is increasing
as evident from the trend in the number of node overlaps
with seawater. For example, as many as 780 POPs and 242
data centers will be surrounded by 4 ft. of seawater in 2075;
6 ft. of seawater will affect 788 POPs and 249 data centers by
the end of this century.
Figure 3 shows the amount of long-haul and metro conduit
and submarine cable that will be under water based on the
projected sea level rise scenarios. We make the following
observations based on this link overlap graph. First, metro

City (Landing Stations)
Manasquan, NJ (2)
Miami, FL (2)
Pacific City, OR (2)
Tuckerton, NJ (2)
Bandon, OR (1)

fiber links are at highest risk, especially the northeastern and
northwestern regions of the US and the gulf coast area from
western Florida to Texas. Specifically, in the next 15 years, as
much as 2,429 miles of metro fiber conduit will be submerged
after a 1 ft of sea level rise, whereas as 2,637 miles of metro
fiber conduit will be affected in the next century. Next, the
long-haul fiber conduits that connect IXPs and colocation
facilities along coastal areas are also vulnerable to effects of
sea level rise. This include gulf coast area from Florida to
Texas and the northeastern and northwestern regions of the
US, ranging from 1,186 miles of fiber conduit in 2030 (1 ft) to
as high as 1,239 miles of fiber in 2100. Similar to the constant
trend in the number of landing stations, the affected lengths
of submarine cables are not highly variable: we observe an
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ANRW ’18, July 16, 2018, Montreal, QC, Canada

increase of one mile in 2060 (3 ft) and it remains constant
there after. Given the large number of nodes and miles of fiber
conduit that are at risk, the key takeaway is that developing
mitigation strategies should begin soon.
Table 3: Top 5 cities with high climate change risk index for link assets. The corresponding fiber miles and
percentage under water are given in parenthesis.

with many recent articles [10, 15, 16] about the threats to
populations and businesses [1, 31].
In Table 3, we list the five cities in the US that will be
most affected by sea level rise based on link infrastructure
concentration. The number of affected fiber conduit miles are
also shown. We observe not unexpectedly that the number
of metro fiber conduit miles that are at risk is far greater than
the number of long haul conduit miles. However, outages
in the long haul infrastructure will likely have much more
far-reaching effects in the US and the Internet writ large.
Considering those effects is a topic for future work. We also
stress that while it may be feasible to harden and secure
nodes for some period of time in the next century, securing
links will be much more challenging since they are buried
and therefore much more difficult to access.
To complement the results in Table 2 and Table 3, Figure 4
shows how a 6 ft. rise in sea level will overlap with Internet
assets in New York (left) and Miami (right). Considering only
the node assets, we find that New York has a total of 97 modes
and has the highest risk. Similarly, New York is the city at
highest risk in the US with 337 and 79 miles of metro and
long-haul fiber conduit respectively, when considering only
the fiber assets. Combining the results from Tables 2 and 3,
New York, Miami and Seattle2 have the highest risk/overlap
with node and fiber conduit in the US.
Table 4: Top 10 providers with the most infrastructure
at risk due to climate change.

City (Long-haul)
Los Angeles, CA (89, 14.54%)
New York, NY (79, 32%)
Miami, FL (62, 5.3%)
New Orleans, LA (43, 22.51%)
San Francisco, CA (31, 7.4%)

City (Metro)
New York, NY (337, 19.8%)
Seattle, WA (236, 23.6%)
San Francisco, CA (158, 9.43%)
Miami, FL (149, 13.27%)
Los Angeles, CA (138, 20.14%)

Figure 2: Number of POPs, data centers, IXPs and landing stations affected by SLRI.

Cities
CenturyLink
Intelliquent
AT&T
BroadSky
TW Telecom
Verizon
Beyond The Network
Cogent
Zayo
Sprint

Provider Analysis. We conclude by identifying the service providers with the most infrastructure that is at risk in
the next 15 years in Table 4. We construct the list by counting the number of nodes and fiber conduit miles associated
with each provider in each of the top-10 cities with high CIR
metrics. Providers including CenturyLink, Intelliquent and
AT&T have most infrastructure—hence, the most risk—in
the coastal areas.

Figure 3: Miles of fiber of long-haul, metro and submarine cable paths affected by SLRI.
Coastal Infrastructure Risk Analysis (CIR). Next, we
identify cities with Internet infrastructure that are at risk
based on the concentration of nodes and links in those cities
using our CIR metric. Table 2 shows the five cities most at
risk based on node type are listed. From Table 2 we observe
that infrastructures in the coastal cities are the most vulnerable assets in the Internet. In particular, the cities in the
northeastern region and the southern part of the US are at
highest risk. For example, as many as as 46 POPs, 43 data
centers and 8 IXPs in New York will have seawater incursion.
Such effects are observable in other coastal areas including
Miami and Seattle. These results expand and are consistent

4 NEXT STEPS
4.1 Expanding Vulnerability Assessment

While our assessment described in §3 highlights the extent
to which the Internet infrastructure overlaps with projected
seawater ingress, it is static and is limited in terms of (i) the
scope of climate change related threats (e.g., storms, which
2 Affected

5

long-haul conduit miles for Seattle, which ranked 6th, is 23 miles.

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Durairajan et al.

Figure 4: Overlap of Internet infrastructure and seawater in New York (left) and Miami (right) with average sea
level rise of 6 feet.
are dynamic), (ii) understanding how coastal infrastructure
outages can lead to cascading failures on inland assets, (iii)
quantifying the risks to users and businesses that might be
affected by the failed infrastructure, and (iv) the fact that it
only considers the US. This calls for expanded analysis of infrastructure risk improve our understanding of the potential
impact of climate change on the Internet and thereby enable
more accurate and comprehensive mitigation planning.

4.2

growth, operational cost control, etc.) will be important in
the planning process. These plans must include consideration
of issues including new rights of way, costs and projections
of how populations will move. One approach is to formulate deployment as a multi-objective optimization problem
where the objective is to maximize the revenue of ISPs for
deployments in low-risk locations that cost-effective [22].
Other aspects of risk-aware deployment include developing
new methods for hardening fiber cables, conduits and other
infrastructure to be more resistant to severe weather that
will be a consequence of climate change.

Mitigation Planning

An important next step after a risk assessment such as ours
is developing mitigation strategies. The strategies should be
designed to minimize the impact of failures in coastal areas
on inland infrastructure. One approach would be to consider
how CIR metrics can be integrated into existing inter- and
intra-domain routing substrate to create backup and alternative routes that reduce the impact of coastal infrastructure
failures (e.g., related approach can be found in [25]).
Another important strategy for mitigating climate changerelated risks is to harden critical infrastructure in vulnerable
areas. To this end, we believe that our analysis and expanded
vulnerability analyses will provide a foundation for (i) frameworks to assess the impact of physical countermeasures such
as seawalls and hardened enclosures for submarine cable
landing points, (ii) mechanisms, protocols and systems to
enable new methods for risk-aware and reliable routing, and
(iii) policies for spectrum re-allocation so that first responders can communicate with minimum or no interruption.

4.3

5

SUMMARY

In this paper, we describe an investigation of the threat of climate change-related sea level rise to Internet infrastructure
in the US. Our study is based on fusing two spatial datasets:
the Internet Atlas repository of Internet infrastructure and
NOAA’s Sea Level Rise Inundation, which projects sea level
rise in the US over the next century. Our analysis recognizes
the vulnerability of buried fiber conduit and colocation centers in coastal areas. The results of our overlap analysis show
that ∼4.1k miles of fiber conduit will be under water and
over 1.1k colocation centers will be surrounded by water in
the next 15 years. We develop a geo-based metric to assess
Internet infrastructure risks in local areas and find New York,
Miami and Seattle to be the most vulnerable areas, and that
large service providers including CenturyLink, Intelliquent
and AT&T have the most infrastructure risk. We believe that
these results highlight a real and present threat to the management and operations of communications systems and
that steps should be taken soon to develop plans to address
this threat.

Risk-aware Future Deployments

Future deployments of Internet infrastructure (including
colocation and data centers, conduits, cell towers, etc.) will
need to consider the impact of of climate change. Flexible decision support capabilities that include risk-/failureawareness along with other ISP objectives (e.g., revenue
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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We thank the reviewers for their insightful comments. This
work is supported by NSF grants CNS-1703592, DHS BAA
11-01, AFRL FA8750-12-2-0328. The views and conclusions
contained herein are those of the authors and should not be
interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies
or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of NSF, DHS,
AFRL or the U.S. Government.

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