Tatsat Chronicle Magazine

A Black Box To Capture Climate Change

Located in Australia, the device will record every right and wrong step in terms of the impending crisis
December 9, 2021
Earth's Black Box
The box will be made from 7.5-centimetre-thick steel. Picture Credit - Earth's Black Box

Australian scientists and artists have found a way to hold the world accountable for the Earth’s future by creating an “indestructible” storage device to record humans’ handling of the climate change crisis. Inspired by an aeroplane’s flight recorder, the Earth’s Black Box will be built next year on the remote West coast of Tasmania, an area believed geographically and politically stable, said its makers, who come from marketing communications company Clemenger BBDO to the University of Tasmania.

“Earth Black Box is a structure and device that will record every step that humanity takes towards or away from the impending climate catastrophe,” said Jim Curtis, Executive Creative Director, Clemenger BBDO. Not only would the box give the world data on climate change, the information recorded would also help hold leaders accountable and leave lessons for future generations. If the worst is to happen and as a civilisation, we crash because of climate change, the indestructible box will be there and record every detail of it. So, in the end, whoever is left or discovers the black box afterwards, will learn from our mistakes.

The 10-metre-long steel monolith Earth Black Box has been designed to withstand natural disasters and will be powered by solar and thermal energy. The device will be connected to the internet, use an algorithm to regularly scrape data relating to climate change using a set of 500 metrics, and will store it automatically. It will have storage drives with climate-change-related data such as average temperatures and global energy consumption.