18 | New Scientist | 4 April 2020
News
Data storageTHE ancient oceans of Pluto may
have arisen relatively quickly after
the now-frozen dwarf planet came
to be, melting from ice in a process
that suggests Pluto formed in just
30,000 years.
“We don’t really know how
planets get assembled, but in
general, we think things bang into
each other, and they accumulate,”says Francis Nimmo at the University
of California, Santa Cruz, whose
work was due to be presented at
the cancelled Lunar and Planetary
Science Conference in Texas.
Pluto probably had liquid water
on its surface at some point: images
from NASA’s New Horizons mission
show giant rifts that were probably
made as water froze and expanded.
If Pluto had a “cold start” and began
as a mixture of rock and ice, its
oceans would have come later as ice
melted. If this were the case, there
should be signs of earlier ice meltinginto oceans before later refreezing,
but these haven’t been observed.
This supports the idea that Pluto
had a “hot start”, in which liquid
water was present early on.
Furthermore, Nimmo says that if
Pluto’s oceans formed slowly, you
would expect to see wrinkles on its
surface. These haven’t been seen,
suggesting they formed quickly.Nimmo’s team modelled Pluto’s
formation, accounting for how heat
would travel through Pluto in either
a hot or cold case. With a hot start,
Pluto would have formed in less
than 30,000 years, meaning it had
oceans relatively soon after creation.
As Pluto’s core cooled, these
oceans would have slowly refrozen.
“If this model is right, it suggests
similar objects in the Kuiper Belt
will have formed fast too, and that
early oceans may have been pretty
ubiquitous,” says Nimmo. ❚A PLAN to expand a physical
backup of the world’s most widely
used open-source software held
inside a mountain in the Arctic
will go ahead this month, despite
the coronavirus pandemic.
GitHub, an online software
host owned by Microsoft, has
already stored the equivalent of
10,000 folders of source code files
in Coal Mine 3, a disused facility
on the island of Spitsbergen in
Svalbard, Norway.
This month, the company will
hugely expand its existing storage
by adding repositories that can
hold another 100 million folders –
the equivalent of 5000 hours of
movies. This will include all the
open-source code it currently
holds that is already backed up
on servers around the world.
Thomas Dohmke at GitHub says
that given the uncertainty created
by the coronavirus outbreak,
increasing the company’s means
of preserving the data feels “more
important than ever”. The use of
open-source software has grown
hugely in the past decade: now
more than 90 per cent of all
software projects depend on
it to some extent, he says.
“We think it is important topreserve for future generations,”
says Dohmke. “It’s not so much
about a nuclear strike, or a comet
hitting the Earth, or some
pandemic. It’s more about creating
an opportunity for future
generations to study how software
development worked in the early
2000s, in the same way that we
study what the Romans built 2000
years ago, and we relearn things
that we had forgotten.”
Despite the global disruption
the pandemic has caused, GitHub
is still on track to do the work inApril, says Dohmke. The files
will be stored as QR codes on
film made in the Norwegian
city of Drammen by data storage
firm Piql.
The existing GitHub backup
is held on one reel of film,
which sits on a shelf at the same
unstaffed facility, safe behind an
unassuming pair of grey doors
located off an access tunnel tothe mine. Once the new backup
is added, there will be around
200 reels.
GitHub will include a guide,
or “tech tree”, for each reel of film,
so that what is stored on it can
be interpreted later. “Even if you
come in 1000 years and you have
no idea what open-source or
software development ever was,
you can use that tech tree to
understand it,” says Dohmke.
The film is designed to last a
millennium in the permafrost of
Svalbard. Yet global warming and
weather changes have already
forced a €20 million upgrade of
another Arctic storage project, a
nearby global seed vault, after its
entrance flooded in October 2016
due to heavy rainfall and melting
permafrost. Dohmke says it isn’t
clear whether climate change
poses a threat to the safety of the
backup. “The honest answer is,
I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe
it is, time will tell,” he says.
Other technologies in
development, such as Microsoft’s
Project Silica, which uses lasers to
store data in quartz glass discs,
could last for 10,000 years and
should be ready in the next two
years, says Dohmke. ❚“ If oceans formed slowly,
you would expect wrinkles
on the surface, like on
Mercury and the moon”Solar system
The backed-up code will
be held inside GitHub’s
vault in a disused mineAdam VaughanGITHUBCode kept on ice for 1000 years
Microsoft-owned firm to go ahead with work to safeguard commonly used data
Pluto’s early oceans
hint the icy world
formed rapidlyJason Arunn Murugesu