A disused airport on Tasmania’s West Coast will soon host an angular steel structure known as ‘Earth’s Black Box’, designed to record ‘every step’ humanity takes toward ‘catastrophe’. The box, roughly the size of a city bus and made of 3-inch-thick steel, will be perched on the granite landscape of western Tasmania and is expected to be up and running by the end of the year.
Climate Change and the Black Box
The box’s design is imposing, with concrete panels and a roof of tough glass with solar panels underneath, making it essentially an indestructible, self-powered data-recording device. It will record hundreds of climate data points and pieces of contextual information, including temperatures, sea level rise, and climate reports.
The project’s founder, Rob Beamish, hopes the box will continue to provoke and show people there’s still time to influence climate outcomes. ‘It exists to force the climate reality and the existential risk of climate change into the public consciousness,’ he said. However, some climate experts question the project’s ability to have a long-term impact and to motivate action.
Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, said the box could ‘serve as a validator for the records already preserved by the Earth.’ The planet keeps its own climate history, conserved in natural features such as tree rings, ice cores, and corals, which allow scientists to reconstruct a picture of the climate going back millennia.
Original reporting: KTVZ (Central Oregon) — read the source article.
