> b) Isn't marine biology highly sensitive to heat pollution?
Impact on the marine environment is briefly mentioned in the last couple of paragraphs of the article, although they're a little dismissive and don't provide any evidence supporting their claim of negligible impact.
Nuclear power plants usually dump their tertiary cooling water into the ocean. That's not a great situation for the local sea life (within a few hundred meters, IIRC), but doesn't have much significance beyond that. That is several orders of magnitudes more heat output than could conceivably come off a data centre. So their dismissiveness is likely warranted.
A bit more concerning is the notion of relocating these data centre pods. Long-term "reefs" that are relocated around the world could perhaps be a new and different vector for transmitting invasive organisms. I'm not an expert, but I'd want to hear a few of them opine as to whether this creates any risks that ordinary shipping does not.
>Nuclear power plants usually dump their tertiary cooling water into the ocean
The heated water from a power plant can actually provide a refuge for manatees and other wildlife that prefer warm water during cold winter. They're actually known as good fishing spots in Florida!
I don't think the plan is relocations. More than likely, MS see server numbers growing over time, at the very least for the foreseeable future, and they'll be located once, and then decommissioned, not moved.
That may change, but I doubt there are less server farms in 2020 than now.
As a side note, isn't that also Google's plan - the server farm as a single entity, where nothing is really fixed, just turned off and eventually replaced? In such a world, where a server farm exists then dies, underwater seems a great place for them. No regulations, no repairs, locally powered via means that no one can complain about (NIMBYism is a powerful force) just run until decommissioned.
> "A bit more concerning is the notion of relocating these data centre pods"
What are the requirements for cargo ships? I suspect they run into this regularly when in a dock for extended periods or undergoing maintenance that doesn't require a dry-dock.
Nuclear power plants usually dump their tertiary cooling water into the ocean.
Nuclear plants also use cooling towers to lower the temperature before it dumped back into a lake/river/ocean. You can do a Google search, but those towers are hollow on the inside. Water runs down the inside walls and convection currents move up.
I'm not an expert either, but one should keep in mind that this was an experiment with a single vessel. Even the shiny PR images in the articles show clusters of hundreds of vessels for actual operation. So it's more "few thousandths of a degree times X" and that seems less harmless to me.
A single coal power plant is negligible to the environment too. Half the world powered by coal isn't.
I'm not sure what that means (or if it's really true). The temperature at night doesn't drop to almost (absolute) zero; the oceans don't freeze; so plenty of the Sun's energy must still be present.
The initial statement was power/area, the instantaneous energy input from the sun, given as 1GW/sq km. The energy input from the sun at night really is pretty much zero.
The initial statement argued that because organisms are "fine" with 1GW/sq km, they therefore should be fine with the additional heat of a datacenter. I disagreed with the conclusion, not the number.
The second statement was that "OTOH, that 1GW drops to almost zero at night." It may be a literally true statement on its own, but it's misleading in response to a statement that absolute zero isn't a realistic basis for this discussion.
That the ecology is able to handle variations in temperature, even large ones, does not mean it can handle an absolute shift. 10±5 degrees is not the same as 11±5.
Impact on the marine environment is briefly mentioned in the last couple of paragraphs of the article, although they're a little dismissive and don't provide any evidence supporting their claim of negligible impact.