An impenetrable steel ‘Black Box’ will record ‘every step’ humanity takes toward catastrophe

By Laura Paddison, CNN

(CNN) — 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.

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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.

The box is part art installation, part data repository, part old-fashioned time capsule and part fear generator. For those behind it — including ad agency Clemenger and art collective Glue Society — the box is intended as a call to action, snapping people’s attention toward the escalating climate crisis.

Some climate experts, however, question the project’s ability to have a long-term impact and to motivate action. There’s also the tricky part of figuring out how descendants of humanity will be able to access the box’s data. “What will future technology be like in a climate-ravaged society? We don’t really know,” Beamish said.

Earth’s Black Box is named after the black box flight recorder, an almost indestructible device on airplanes that stores flight data, including pilots’ decisions, and helps investigators reconstruct accidents. For the purposes of this project, the planet is the plane and humanity is the pilot.

The box aims to provoke fear — which Beamish calls “a massive motivator for climate action” — but also hope. “The plane’s still in the air … there is still hope to really avoid the very worst of climate change,” he said.

The box’s completion would mark the end of a long process. It was first announced in 2021, at the time of the COP26 UN climate talks in Glasgow, immediately generating buzzy headlines and even featuring in Stephen Colbert’s opening monologue on the Late Show. “We’re doomed,” Colbert said, bringing his face close to the camera.

At the time, the project leaders said the box would be completed in 2022. Four years later, construction is has yet to start, although its components are currently being assembled.

“Look, it’s a really audacious project,” Beamish said, citing the need for the right design and engineering plans, building approvals and crucially, funding, most of which has come from donors. Timelines are always “slippery” he said, but the hope is everything will be up and running by December.

In Tasmania, local authorities appear to welcome the project. Shane Pitt, the mayor of the West Coast region, said the island was chosen because it’s “one of the most geologically and politically stable regions in the world.” He believes the box may have the added benefit of drawing more tourists to this remote area of the island, home to around 4,600 people.

Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University and chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, 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. The Black Box could help preserve records at more precise timescales, Hayhoe said.

But she questioned the idea that fear will prompt action. Fear is a motivator for climate awareness and information sharing but not action, she said: “Why not? Because if you don’t know what to do, you’ll do nothing.”

Anthony Leiserowitz, a professor of climate communication at Yale School of the Environment, said fear usually provokes a fight-or-flight response, which is excellent at motivating behavior when someone faces an immediate threat, say, a saber-toothed tiger about to pounce.

But it’s not a sustainable emotion, he added, “and climate change is not like a saber-toothed tiger; climate change is a chronic problem that gets progressively worse over decades.”

Even if the project is effective in sparking awareness, Leiserowitz added, it would need repeated stories over years to stay in people’s minds, he said.

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. “That’s really what it’s there for.”

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