If you made up this scenario for a tabletop exercise, you’d be laughed out of the room:

At 08:00 on Wednesday morning January 30, two ships 2,500 kilometers (1,600 miles) apart in the Mediterranean drop their anchors in stormy weather off Alexandria, Egypt and Marseilles, France at the same time. They both manage to drop their anchors directly onto two (2) separate undersea cables buried fifty (50) centimeters in the sand, each roughly the diameter of your wrist.

The two cables carry seventy-five (75%) percent of network traffic in the Middle East and south Asia. Your business in India or Egypt loses over half its international data and voice network capacity.

Two days later on Friday morning, February 1, a third cable is severed by an abandoned anchor embedded in the sea floor off the coast of Dubai, also 2,500 kilometers (1600 miles) from Alexandria, but in a different direction. That cable is owned by the Indian company that also owns one of the cables broken earlier. It is not clear how an abandoned anchor could sever a stationary cable.

Your voice and data networks are now crawling at just 25% of capacity. A spokesman for your business in India or Egypt calls it a “national disaster.”  Read more... (829 words, 0 images, estimated 3:19 mins reading time)

I receive email warnings from the U.S. National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Pacific Tsunami Warning Center about earthquakes that might cause tsunami events in the Pacific Rim. The service is fast, free and helpful to emergency response authorities.

Just since late July I’ve received alerts for several earthquakes: two in the South Pacific, two in the Aleutian Islands (Alaska), the big one off the coast of Peru. The PTWC warnings are text-based so they can be received on the lowest common technology denominator, I suppose. The alerts contain no HTML links to the PTWC web site where you could see maps showing the locations of earthquakes.

So I can find it hard to place an event’s latitude and longitude in my mind – “2.7 NORTH 127.5 EAST”, for example. Most people can picture “the coast of Peru,” but I must admit I’m a bit hazy about “North Moluccan Sea.”

Where is that, anyway?

You can find out quickly and simply, and in stunning detail, in Google Earth. Download and install Google Earth (15 megabytes) onto your computer. It’s free. And sign up to receive the PTWC alerts by email. They’re free. too. Then wait for an alert message to show up in your mailbox.

Inside each alert you’ll find data for these parameters:  Read more... (479 words, 0 images, estimated 1:55 mins reading time)