In a modern five-story building in the center of Hamburg, Germany, technicians are busy preparing to install several new server racks—the gray metal casings that house essential computing hardware—alongside the dozens that already line the narrow, dimly lit corridors of the German Climate Computing Center, known as the DKRZ. As one of the world’s foremost repositories for climate simulation data, the DKRZ is expanding its infrastructure to tackle an unprecedented mission. The new equipment will add approximately 5 petabytes of storage capacity to the 254 petabytes of data already securely stored on-site. To put this expansion into perspective, a single petabyte of data is roughly equivalent to the storage space required for 200 million high-resolution images.
Under normal operating circumstances, the DKRZ’s primary mission is to provide robust computing power and vast storage capabilities to the domestic German climate science community. However, these newly arriving racks are destined to serve a vastly different and highly sensitive purpose: they will store secure backup versions of complex climate simulations originating from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. This international operation aims to ensure that essential scientific work performed by United States researchers for the upcoming major United Nations climate assessment, scheduled for 2029, cannot be politically meddled with, suppressed, or compromised by the administration of President Donald Trump.
The Trump administration has systematically targeted climate science and research infrastructure, having slashed funding for numerous climate studies, buried official scientific reports, and removed direct references to human-caused global warming from dozens of federal government websites. Furthermore, the administration has actively sought to prevent vital Earth-observing satellites from collecting key environmental and climate data.
Leaders of German science organizations are publicly citing these hostile federal actions as their primary motivation for creating off-site digital backups. The German Research Foundation, which serves as the country’s main science funding body, has expressed growing concern that the Trump administration could eventually block European access to vital data and research findings currently housed within the United States.
"The deletion of data has also become a possibility," said Kathrin Winkler, a program manager at the German Research Foundation, highlighting the severe anxiety gripping the international scientific community. "And there is a risk that data could be manipulated to skew findings in a desired direction."
Trust in U.S. science policy among European nations has plummeted to historic lows, fueling mounting fears over the potential loss of irreplaceable scientific data. These concerns intensified after the U.S. government officially withdrew from both the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in January, even though many individual U.S. researchers continue to actively contribute to global climate science. To support and protect these beleaguered scientists, the German Research Foundation established a specialized funding program in late 2025 with a budget of $35 million. The initiative is designed to create a safe harbor for permanently storing copies of endangered U.S. data sourced from public and open repositories.
The specific project underway at the DKRZ is officially named CMIP7-ark, functioning essentially as a digital lifeboat for the U.S. contribution to the seventh IPCC assessment. Alongside this prominent initiative, six other projects focused on safeguarding critical U.S. science datasets have also received financial backing. These efforts bear names such as SHIELD and SEND, which stands for Secure Endangered Earth Data.
Christopher Kadow, head of the data analysis division at the DKRZ, emphasized the urgency of the undertaking. "We cannot simply accept that important contributions might be lost for technical or political reasons," Kadow said.
Data collections form the foundational bedrock of all empirical science, and climate, environmental, and biodiversity research relies heavily on countless historical and contemporary datasets. Some of these collections are irreplaceable, such as the iconic time series of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations measured continuously for decades at Hawaiʻi’s Mauna Loa Observatory, which remain critical for tracking global environmental change. Last year, the Trump administration attempted to defund and ultimately shutter the observatory, though Congress ultimately rejected the proposed budget cuts.
While detailed datasets are essential for ongoing research, creating off-site backups has never been standard procedure in the scientific community. Historically, most scientific datasets are physically stored on local hard drives or magnetic tapes housed at the specific universities or research institutions where they are generated. One simple reason for this practice is that, until recently, the geopolitical landscape was stable enough that scientists saw little need for expensive off-site redundancies. Another major hurdle is the sheer complexity of transferring and storing such massive volumes of information. Transmitting petabytes of data across the internet can take months, while renting dedicated, faster fiber-optic cables can be prohibitively expensive.
Consequently, the most cost-effective method for moving immense quantities of data often involves loading them onto hard drives or significantly cheaper magnetic tapes and relying on the "sneakernet"—physically transporting the physical media by car, plane, or ship.
Because the process remains expensive and logistically arduous, most valuable datasets have historically been kept in just a single location. However, in an era where political upheaval, cyberattacks, and armed conflicts are becoming increasingly frequent, this traditional reliance on single-site storage is widely viewed as dangerously precarious.
"If data is stored at only one site, there is a much greater risk of loss from events such as extreme weather or infrastructure failure," noted Eleanor O’Rourke, the U.K.-based director of the International Project Office of lodgement for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, which coordinates global climate models for IPCC assessments. Today, climate simulations prepared for the IPCC are considered so vital that overseas repositories are deemed necessary for all contributing nations.
Until recently, the notion that the U.S. scientific community would need to track down and rescue its own lost datasets would have been considered unthinkable. After all, environmental data generated or funded by U.S. government agencies is financed by taxpayers and generally resides in the public domain. Yet these datasets exist in physical forms at specific locations and require dedicated technical experts to maintain them, rendering them uniquely vulnerable to human interference, natural disasters, technical malfunctions like electrical fires, and institutional neglect.
"The data repositories, digital asset management services, and preservation systems that ensure research data remains open and accessible are often overlooked—until they disappear," data experts Jennifer Gibson and Kaitlin Thaney warned in a recent essay.
A striking example of politically motivated interference is the recent threat directed at 300 federally funded datasets painstakingly assembled over decades by NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center, known as SEDAC. Alex de Sherbinin, the former manager of SEDAC, explained that the center was originally founded to serve as a vital bridge between the Earth and social-science research communities by integrating remote sensing data with detailed information concerning human population growth, poverty, and infrastructure.
In early April 2025, de Sherbinin was shocked to discover that SEDAC’s datasets had been completely removed by a team associated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. It took extraordinary efforts by various academic and scientific institutions—rapidly scraping datasets from active servers while they were still operational—to secure the information and transfer it to a new permanent 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, given the anti-science predisposition of the current administration," de Sherbinin said.
Numerous similar grassroots and institutional projects are now underway to relocate or duplicate endangered datasets within the United States. However, the U.S. is far from the only country where scientific data faces severe vulnerability, and political interference is not the only risk threatening global knowledge.
Several research institutions around the world, including a multidisciplinary scientific research center in Croatia and an industrial engineering institute in Germany, have been targeted in recent years by sophisticated hacking operations. In these cyberattacks, intruders infiltrate systems, block access to critical files, and demand substantial ransoms to restore them. While victims of cybercrime rarely disclose publicly which specific files were targeted, the incidents underscore how vulnerable modern scientific data collections have become to digital extortion.
Then there is the devastating impact of war. Russia’s ongoing military assaults on Ukraine have caused catastrophic civilian suffering alongside immense, irreparable damage to the nation’s scientific infrastructure.
"Universities and research institutes have been targeted by Russian bombardments, and in some cases they were completely destroyed," said Anastasiia Lutsenko, a Ukrainian researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich, whose work examines how her country’s scientific system is responding to wartime conditions. The Russian military, she noted, understands precisely how much lasting harm can be inflicted by systematically attacking science.
Lutsenko highlights the ongoing transfer of data and physical samples to secure international locations as a crucial preservation step. Even prior to Russia’s full-scale 2022 invasion, a joint German-Polish-Ukrainian collaboration successfully digitized historical records of early meteorological observations conducted between 1808 and 1880 at eight Ukrainian weather stations. These records were safely transferred to a secure server at the University of Giessen in Germany, successfully eliminating the risk of losing invaluable historical data to the ravages of war. A similar emergency data transfer took place after missiles struck near servers holding Ukraine’s contribution to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility in Kharkiv during the initial weeks of the invasion.
The urgent need for increased resilience—defined as the capacity to remain fully functional despite sudden shocks and to recover completely from them—took center stage at the American Geophysical Union gathering held in Berlin this March. Nearly 100 experts, hailing primarily from the United States and Europe, convened to discuss strategies for responding to the Trump administration’s systematic dismantling of scientific programs.
The AGU represents more than 60,000 Earth and space scientists worldwide and has emerged as a leading organizational voice in efforts to protect science and researchers from politically motivated attacks. When the federal government refused to send official U.S. experts to IPCC meetings in 2025, the AGU proactively formed the U.S. Academic Alliance for the IPCC and nominated nearly 300 U.S. scientists to serve as authors for the upcoming assessment. During the summer of 2025, the organization also launched its ambitious Data Resilience Project, a global initiative designed to fundamentally rethink how scientific data is organized and preserved.
Ben Zaitchik, president-elect of the AGU, believes the scientific community has reached a critical historical inflection point.
"We have engaged in triage efforts to ensure data remains usable and accessible," Zaitchik said during the Berlin meeting. "But we clearly now have arrived at a moment where we must fundamentally reimagine data organization and maintenance for long-term viability and growth."
Creating redundant backups of critical datasets and storing them in secure, geographically distant locations was identified as a top priority during the gathering, alongside better coordination within the global data community to mitigate present and future risks. Such collaborative efforts are vital not only for academic researchers, an AGU spokesperson noted, but also for civil engineers, public safety officials, health experts, policymakers, and a wide array of industries and communities worldwide that depend entirely on accurate scientific data. As a direct result of the Berlin discussions, a broad coalition of German national research centers was established to offer safe, open-access storage for public domain information originating from scientists in the U.S. and other vulnerable nations.
Complementing the DKRZ’s efforts, various specialized initiatives have emerged across different scientific disciplines. For instance, the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt is actively saving data captured by wildlife trail cameras in Ukraine alongside biodiversity data originating from war-torn Yemen.
"We want to ensure that biodiversity data remains usable even under crisis conditions," a Senckenberg spokesperson explained.
For successful data transfers, experts emphasize that it is critical to archive not only the raw data itself, but also any specialized software and metadata required to properly read, interpret, and analyze it.
"We’re developing protocols and procedures for exchanging data, distributing multiple copies globally, and ensuring that the data remains analyzable indefinitely," said 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 Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research and the university. Both institutions are currently preparing to integrate extensive datasets from a U.S. climate research center slated for closure.
Reflecting on the unprecedented international scramble to preserve scientific knowledge, Glöckner suggested that President Trump has inadvertently highlighted a systemic flaw in how research has historically been managed.
"He has, to a certain extent, done science a favor by making it clear how important it is to not just hoard data in one place, but to truly share it with the global scientific community," Glöckner said.
Looking ahead, researchers hope to build a more interconnected and resilient digital architecture.
"It would be ideal if, in the future, all climate data worldwide were connected via digital pipelines," Kadow said of the DKRZ initiatives. "That way, in the event of a threat, we could simply flip a switch to secure it elsewhere."
Kadow added that such robust global networks could eventually protect researchers in Germany as well, noting that the Alternative for Germany, an extreme far-right political party that openly denies mainstream climate science, recently won a state election for the first time.
"We don’t know what political shifts may occur in Germany," he concluded. "We aren’t completely protected from risks or developments like those in the U.S. either."