A friend of mine wrote a paper on the effects of cosmic rays on memory errors in data centers a few years ago[1]. He also posited they had effects on hard drive reliability.
The first thing I thought of when reading this article is whether the increased shielding from the water reduced the impact of cosmic rays on the hardware.
In a more dramatic example, Virginia Tech strung together over a thousand PowerMac G5s in a cluster they called the “Big Mac”, and it was one of the fastest (and cheapest) supercomputers of the world at the time. Unfortunately its lack of ECC RAM made its failure rate so high it would have trouble even booting. They dismantled it and sold the machines away one at a time and replaced the entire thing with an Xserve array instead, which had ECC.
I've always wondered whether the orientation of the memory chips in your computer made a difference for cosmic ray errors. That is to say, if their face is to the sky vs. their edge, will it affect the error rate?
Cosmic rays can come from any angle, and even pass through the entire earth without impacting anything. (millions of them are zipping through you and your RAM, right now! electrons barely dodging out of the way in time.)
I think (but have no reference) that the amount of cosmic rays the planet blocks by being in the way is dwarfed by the effects of the magnetosphere and solar rays.
Slight nit-pick: Neutrinos are the ones that are zipping through you and the Earth. They interact with things very rarely and have no real charge anyway. The rays you'd worry about with computer hardware are photons (gamma rays) with high energy enough to create new charged particles. Also other charged particles like muons and their decay cascades.
I think there is something to this I used to have a radio that would pickup this type of interference and days when it was heavy I would have more than usual amount hardware failures even powersupplies.
The first thing I thought of when reading this article is whether the increased shielding from the water reduced the impact of cosmic rays on the hardware.
[1]: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/ASPLOS2012.pdf