Processing post

To understand global patterns of climate change across deep time, Shannon shows, researchers must study samples from ice cores, sediments, tree rings etc. She shows how ice, rocks, sediments, and soils become archival documents in themselves.

But she argues, for example, the preservation of ice cores as document has a deeply paradoxical nature. It is at once concerned with tracking and monitoring patterns of environmental change, but its intensely complex processes of collection, transportation, storage and requires an enormous amount of energy to ensure its refrigeration during all these stages. “Freezing ice cores to study climate change is a practice saturated with ironies,” she quotes Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal. In a similar vein, as data storage centers now make up a large chunk of global energy use.

Data and archiving (and perhaps infrastructure?) are central to the interface between environmental processes and policy, consciousness, and imagination. How do we negotiate the energy-intensive means of tracking environmental meltdown that is itself caused by the dependency on energy? Indeed, a cosmic irony!

dubious durability

It is mind blowing to consider the scope of the lengths we have to go to in order to store even a relatively miniscule chunk of the information continuously being produced at astonishing rates. Not to mention how those rates are expected to rise as time goes on (“Five years ago humans had produced 4.4 zettabytes of data; that’s set to explode to 160 zettabytes (each year!) by 2025. Current infrastructure can handle only a fraction of the coming data deluge, which is expected to consume all the world’s microchip-grade silicon by 2040.” From The Rise of DNA Data Storage). Even more mind blowing to me is the development of artificial DNA technology used as more dense and durable data storage. As I was reading the “Archiving a Website for Ten Thousand Years,” they also mentioned DNA data storage and linked to an article linked here: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160407121455.htm. With this picture:

Captioned:

“All the movies, images, emails and other digital data from more than 600 basic smartphones (10,000 gigabytes) can be stored in the faint pink smear of DNA at the end of this test tube.”

Another image from the sciencedaily article states there will be enough digital data by 2020 to fill six stacks of computer tablets reaching to the moon. I don’t even know what to say about that. Still, I wonder how durable these new technologies actually are. As the “Archiving a Website for Ten Thousand Years,” article discussed, many of the time capsules people thought would remain stable for centuries have been lost to renovations and decay already.