In a modern five-story building in the center of Hamburg, Germany, technicians are preparing to install several new server racks—the gray metal casings that hold essential computing hardware—alongside the scores that already line the narrow, dimly lit corridors of the German Climate Computing Center, or DKRZ. As one of the world’s largest repositories for climate simulation data, the DKRZ is expanding its footprint to accommodate a delicate and urgent mission. The new equipment will add approximately 5 petabytes of storage capacity to the 254 petabytes of data already housed on-site. To put that scale into perspective, a single petabyte of data is equivalent to the storage space required for roughly 200 million high-resolution images.
Under normal circumstances, the DKRZ’s primary mandate is to provide robust computing power and long-term storage to the domestic German climate science community. However, these new server racks will serve a different and highly sensitive purpose: safeguarding backup versions of critical climate simulations originating from the other side of the Atlantic. This international operation aims to ensure that essential scientific work performed by U.S. researchers for the upcoming major United Nations climate assessment, scheduled for 2029, remains secure from political interference, suppression, or disruption by the administration of President Trump.
The Trump administration has enacted sweeping measures affecting federal research, including slashing funding for climate studies, burying scientific reports, removing references to human-caused warming from dozens of government websites, and attempting to prevent federal satellites from collecting critical climate data.
Leaders of German science organizations openly cite these actions as their primary motivation for creating secure overseas data backups. The German Research Foundation, the nation’s principal science funding body, has expressed growing concern that the current U.S. administration could potentially block European access to vital data and research findings traditionally stored within the United States. Kathrin Winkler, a program manager at the foundation, noted that the deletion of data has become a tangible possibility, alongside the looming risk that sensitive information could be manipulated or skewed to fit a desired political direction.
Trust in U.S. science policy has plummeted to historic lows across Europe, escalating fears that years of vital environmental monitoring could vanish. In January, the U.S. government officially withdrew from both the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, though American researchers continue to contribute to global climate science independently. To support these embattled scientists, the German Research Foundation established a specialized funding program late last year with a budget of $35 million. The initiative provides a secure harbor for the permanent storage of U.S. data gathered from public and open sources.
The DKRZ project, designated as CMIP7-ark, functions essentially as a technological lifeboat for the U.S. contribution to the seventh IPCC assessment. Six additional projects dedicated to preserving vulnerable U.S. science datasets—bearing names such as SHIELD and SEND, which stands for Secure Endangered Earth Data—have also secured funding through the initiative. Christopher Kadow, head of the data analysis division at the DKRZ, emphasized the gravity of the endeavor, stating that the scientific community cannot simply accept that important contributions might be lost due to technical or political maneuvering.
Data collections form the bedrock of all empirical science. Climate, environmental, and biodiversity research relies heavily on countless historical and contemporary datasets gathered over decades. Some of these collections, such as the iconic time series of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations measured at Hawaiʻi’s Mauna Loa Observatory, are indispensable for tracking long-term environmental change. Last year, the Trump administration attempted to defund and shutter the observatory, though Congress ultimately rejected the proposed budget cuts.
While detailed datasets are crucial for ongoing research, creating off-site backups has never been standard procedure. Most scientific datasets are physically stored on hard drives or magnetic tapes housed within the universities or research institutions where they were originally generated. Historically, the world was perceived as stable enough that scientists saw little necessity for duplicate, off-site archives. Furthermore, transferring and storing such massive volumes of information is logistically complex. Transmitting petabytes of data over standard internet connections can take months, while leasing faster, dedicated fiber-optic cables is often prohibitively expensive. Consequently, the most cost-effective method for moving immense quantities of data has frequently involved loading them onto hard drives or cheaper magnetic tapes and transporting them physically via car, plane, or ship—a method colloquially known as the "sneakernet."
Because this process remains arduous and costly, most scientific datasets have traditionally been maintained in a single physical location. Yet in an era marked by rising political upheaval, cyberattacks, and armed conflicts, single-site storage is increasingly recognized as a precarious gamble. Eleanor O’Rourke, the U.K.-based director of the International Project Office of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project—which coordinates global climate models for IPCC assessments—noted that when data is kept in only one place, the vulnerability to extreme weather, infrastructure failure, or human intervention multiplies significantly. Consequently, climate simulations prepared for the IPCC are now viewed as so critical that overseas repositories are considered an absolute necessity.
Until recently, the notion that the American scientific community would need to rescue or track down lost datasets seemed unthinkable. Environmental data generated or funded by U.S. government agencies is paid for by taxpayers and generally resides in the public domain. However, these datasets exist in physical form at specific locations and require dedicated experts to maintain them, leaving them exposed to human interference, natural disasters, technical malfunctions such as short circuits, and simple bureaucratic neglect. Data experts Jennifer Gibson and Kaitlin Thaney recently warned that the digital asset management services, repositories, and preservation systems ensuring that research data remains open and accessible are frequently overlooked until the moment they disappear.
A prime example of political interference is the recent threat facing 300 federally funded datasets meticulously compiled over decades by NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center, or SEDAC. Alex de Sherbinin, the former manager of SEDAC, explained that the center was originally established to bridge the gap between Earth science and social science research communities by integrating remote sensing data with information on human population, poverty, and infrastructure.
In early April of last year, de Sherbinin was astonished to discover that SEDAC’s datasets had been abruptly scrubbed by a team from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. It required an extraordinary collaborative effort by various institutions, which rapidly scraped datasets from active servers while they were still operational, to secure the information and transfer it to a new host: the Harvard Dataverse Repository. Assumptions that U.S. government agencies will reliably store scientific data over the long term are proving tenuous at best, de Sherbinin observed, given the current administration’s openly skeptical stance toward empirical research.
Numerous parallel projects are currently underway to relocate or duplicate endangered datasets within the United States. However, the U.S. is far from the only nation where scientific data faces heightened vulnerability, and political interference is not the only source of risk.
Several research institutions worldwide, including a multidisciplinary scientific center in Croatia and an industrial engineering institute in Germany, have recently been targeted by sophisticated ransomware operations in which intruders lock access to files and demand financial extortion to restore them. While victims of cybercrimes rarely disclose publicly which files were targeted, these attacks underscore the fragility of modern scientific data collections.
Armed conflict presents another devastating threat. Russia’s war in Ukraine has caused immense human suffering alongside catastrophic damage to the nation’s scientific infrastructure. Anastasiia Lutsenko, a Ukrainian researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich who studies the resilience of her country’s scientific system, noted that universities and research institutes have been systematically targeted by bombardments and, in some cases, completely obliterated. She emphasized that aggressors understand the lasting harm they can inflict by dismantling scientific foundations.
Lutsenko points to the proactive transfer of data and biological samples to secure international locations as a vital protective measure. Even prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, a joint German-Polish-Ukrainian collaboration successfully digitized historical meteorological observations—conducted between 1808 and 1880 across eight Ukrainian meteorological stations—and transferred them to a secure server at the University of Giessen in Germany, averting the potential loss of invaluable historical records. A similar rescue operation was executed after missiles struck near the servers holding Ukraine’s contribution to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility in Kharkiv during the initial weeks of the invasion.
The urgent need to enhance systemic resilience—defined as the capacity to remain functional despite severe shocks and fully recover from them—took center stage at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) gathering held in Berlin. Nearly 100 experts, predominantly from the United States and Europe, convened to discuss strategic responses to political pressures on science.
Representing more than 60,000 Earth and space scientists globally, the AGU has stepped forward as a prominent advocate for protecting research and researchers. When the U.S. administration declined to send government experts to IPCC meetings, the AGU established the U.S. Academic Alliance for the IPCC and successfully nominated nearly 300 American scientists to serve as authors for the upcoming assessment. Additionally, the organization launched its Data Resilience Project, a global initiative designed to rethink how scientific infrastructure is organized and maintained.
Ben Zaitchik, president-elect of the AGU, remarked during the Berlin meeting that the scientific community has reached an inflection point. While initial efforts have focused on triage to ensure critical data remains usable and accessible, Zaitchik stressed that researchers have arrived at a moment requiring a fundamental reimagining of data organization for long-term viability.
Creating redundant backups in secure, geographically distant locations was identified as an immediate priority during the summit, alongside enhanced coordination within the global data community. An AGU spokesperson noted that maintaining resilient data networks is vital not only for scientists, but also for engineers, public safety officials, health experts, policymakers, and a wide array of industries worldwide that rely heavily on accurate scientific information. In the wake of the Berlin meeting, a broad coalition of German national research centers was established to offer safe, long-term storage for public domain datasets originating from the U.S. and other nations.
Beyond the work being done at the DKRZ, parallel initiatives are emerging across diverse academic disciplines. For example, the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt is actively preserving data from wildlife trail cameras deployed in Ukraine alongside biodiversity records from conflict-torn Yemen. A museum spokesperson stated that the institution aims to ensure biodiversity data remains accessible even under severe crisis conditions.
For such international transfers to succeed, experts emphasize the necessity of preserving not just the raw data files, but also the specialized software required to read and analyze them. Frank Oliver Glöckner, a professor of Earth systems data science at the University of Bremen and head of Pangaea—a long-term data repository operated jointly by the university and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research—explained that institutions are actively developing protocols for exchanging data, distributing multiple copies globally, and ensuring long-term analytical compatibility. Both organizations are currently preparing to integrate data archives from a U.S. climate research center slated for closure.
Glöckner suggested that the current political climate has paradoxically benefited the broader scientific enterprise by highlighting the dangers of hoarding data in isolated locations and reinforcing the necessity of global sharing.
In the future, ideally, all climate data worldwide will be connected via seamless digital pipelines, according to Kadow of the DKRZ. Such an architecture would allow researchers to secure endangered information simply by flipping a switch. He noted that such safeguards could eventually benefit researchers in Germany as well, pointing to recent regional election gains by the AfD, an extreme far-right party that actively denies mainstream climate science. Because future political shifts in Europe remain unpredictable, German scientists recognize that they are not entirely immune to the kinds of institutional pressures currently unfolding in the United States.