Facebook to build facility @ the Arctic Circle

I had been hearing rumors of this new server farm that Facebook plans on constructing. First off it will be huge. According to the Telegraph, Facebook plans to build three giant server halls covering an area the size of 11 football fields. As we know, these "farm" use copious amounts of power. The servers themselves do use quite a large fraction, but the most watts used for the least bang is the cost of cooling the equipment. That is why Facebook has selected a most unusual place for it's newest facility. Luleå, Sweden, which is located just 60 miles south of the arctic circle. There the mean temperature is 35 degrees Fahrenheit and rarely goes above 80. With such frigid temperatures, the farms will simply use outside air to cool the servers.

Even with this massive cost saving, and not discounting the impact it will have on the environment, the facility will still use 120MW of power, enough to supply 16,000 detached homes, and costing some £45m a year. However even this will be provided by a renewable resource, the nearby Luleå river, which by itself, produces twice as much electricity as the Hoover Dam so Luleå exports more than half the power generated.

Telegraph Article Here

Canada sending up new surveillance satellite to spy on inhabitants of North Pole

The Global SpyState is moving apace. The Canadian Space Agency has announced its new surveillance satellite Radarsat-2, set to begin "safeguarding Canada's sovereignty" over its Arctic realms.

Jim Prentice, Canada's Minister of Industry and Minister responsible for the Canadian Space Agency said that RADARSAT-2 "will provide improved surveillance and monitoring capabilities that will provide critical data for the active management of natural resources and monitoring of the environment. .. In the event of a disaster, RADARSAT-2 will be an indispensable tool to provide rescue and humanitarian aid to those most in need".

All well and good, but as is well known, Terra's collapsing Arctic ice is opening up industrial access to hitherto unexploited seafloors where riches unknown await--at least Big Industry hopes so. But inconveniently for the exploiter wannabes, amid the ice are the islands and Innuit people of the Nunavut Territory of arctic Canada, 30,000 strong, whose two million square kilometer expanse extends from north of Hudson's Bay to the North Pole. Established in 1999, Nunavut is Canada's newest province. Check out their arctic lights link

With Radarsat-2 however, surveillance of the activity of everyone in Nunavut, from tiny isolated villages to the streets of Iqaluit, the capital, may be carried out from afar, quite as easily as a downtown street in Toronto or Brisbane; bringing the Innuit, like it or not, into the global spystate, from which, one assumes , it'll keep and eye on the non-corpatriotic among the Innuit.

Set to launch December 8, 2007 the from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Radarsat-2 is one of those "unique public-private sector partnerships" ; i.e. another government/industry hybrid where the taxpayers foot the bill and the shareholders get the profit.