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Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

#171

Post by csomar »

jacquesm wrote: post #10

Why heat the oceans indirectly when you can just place the heatsource directly in them? Much less chance of losing precious ergs. Seriously though, what is the direct ecological impact of doing this at scale, would the local increase in temperature have an immediate effect on the life around it? If so how much of an impact? What about the effect on surface life and life in intermediary layers of the water? After all,…

There is (or was) around a million submarine volcanoes in the ocean according the wikipedia. There are also hydrothermal vents across all of the oceans. The amount of energy to affect the ocean should be colossal (though I didn't do the math). To put it into perspective, we have been pumping crude oil and greenhouse emissions for over a 100 years by billions of people to raise temperatures by a degree or so.

Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

#174

Post by mc32 »

falcolas wrote: post #168
mc32 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is adding... the question is how much compared to natural systems that add heat to the oceans already (in addition to sunlight, thermal vents, oceanic fissures, underwater volcanoes, etc.) is it significant or is it insignificant?

> is it significant or is it insignificant Then a study (ideally multiple studies) should be commissioned to find this out. We shouldn't just do it because we can, and because armchair physicists are pretty sure that it's insignificant. Because, that's what Microsoft (and their partner) did. They did it because they could. Remember when we, as a global society, believed that CFCs would have an insignificant impact on…

I doubt these would add more heat than a single new volcano does, but I’m all ears. According to research[1] tectonic activity adds about 3 cubic km of magma/lava each year to the oceans (that’s 100 times the annual production by mauna loa.)

[1] http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/book/export/html/138

Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

#175

Post by ramon »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #167
ramon wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, actually there has been already many studies that there's no turning back on climate change. Even going all electric energy it's not going to do much for climate change, there's no turning back on this aspect at all.

After reading GP's comment multiple times, I do not see any place where he mentioned turning back climate change. So whether or not your comment is true, it doesn't seem to contradict anything GP said. If we wanted to accelerate climate change, we could obviously do so (as proven in the last century). Meaning we have an impact on the acceleration of climate change. Meaning we can make decisions to make that accelerat…

https://climate.nasa.gov/

Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

#176

Post by bananabreakfast »

falcolas wrote: post #84
ChuckMcM wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scale is off. Things that affect local ecosystems are cooling multi-gigawatt nuclear reactors with nearby ocean water, you would be lucky if one of these drew a megawatt of power. That said, the physics are "heat is heat". If you put it into the air or you put it directly into the ocean the only way it leaves the planet is by black body radiation. As a result locally heating some seawater nearby has (on a global…

> the only way it leaves the planet is by black body radiation But, if you're heating the oceans, you're putting an entire other mass (the atmosphere) between yourself and space. So you're heating the water, the water is heating the atmosphere, and the atmosphere is radiating that into space. It's adding a step to the overall cooling process.

That's not really how it works. The land and ocean radiate their energy directly into space.

This works through emitting mostly infrared frequency light for which, just like visible light, the atmosphere is mostly transparent.

Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

#177

Post by jarito »

slrainka wrote: post #166

If an underwater Datacenter is established in International waters, do any of the data and privacy laws apply?

Yes. Many of the privacy and data protections are not based on where the data is stored, but rather where the people who provided that data reside. For example, GDPR (an EU regulation) applies to US companies with data in the US, but only if the data they are storing belongs to EU customers.

Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

#178

Post by dang »

calibas wrote: post #134
angry_octet wrote: post #43

Another example of the journalistic malpractice of not linking to the original articles or data. https://natick.research.microsoft.com/ https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/project-natick... One of the facts left unmentioned is that this was built and operated by Naval, the French state-owned submarine and shipbuilding corporation.

Especially scummy when they've also broken the functionality of the back button and all the links are to other BBC articles. It's like the main function of the site is to trap you.

"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

#180

Post by ryanmarsh »

I wonder what the engineering tradeoffs are for building sealed/unserviceable capsules vs. pumping cold seawater a few hundred meters to an on-shore DC?

It seems you're just replacing the air/refrigerant heat exchanger for an air/water heat exchanger. Also, an onshore facility could be run in 100% nitrogen as well without the difficulty of managing an artificial reef connected to fiber and power.

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