A disused airport on Tasmania’s rugged West Coast will soon be home to an angular steel structure with a haunting purpose: to record “every step” humanity takes toward “catastrophe.”
The striking monolith, known as “Earth’s Black Box,” will be perched on the granite landscape of western Tasmania — an island about 150 miles off the Australian mainland — and will be up and running by the end of the year, if all goes to plan.
The box’s design is imposing. Roughly the size of a city bus and made of 3-inch-thick steel, it will be surrounded by concrete panels and covered by a roof of tough glass with solar panels underneath.
It’s all to protect and power what’s happening inside. The box will record hundreds of climate data points and pieces of contextual information, everything from temperatures and sea level rise to political speeches and climate reports. It’s “essentially an indestructible, self-powered data-recording device,” said Rob Beamish, founder and creative director of the environmental communications agency Rouser Lab, one of the organizations behind the project.
In the immediate future, the box will be “talking to the world, communicating current data sets and findings,” Beamish said. People will be able to view the data online and visitors to the site will be able to connect to the box via their cellphones. But long-term, the idea is to create a record for future civilizations if climate change wipes out humanity. It will “provide an unbiased account of the events that lead to the demise of the planet,” according to the project’s website.
