A Million-Year Hard Disk

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A Million-Year Hard Disk
It seems these days that no data storage medium lasts long before becoming obsolete-does anyone remember Sony’s Memory Stick? So have pity for the builders of nuclear waste repositories, who are trying to preserve records of what they’ve buried and where, not for a few years but for tens of thousands of years. (…) The sapphire disk is one product of that effort. It’s made from two thin disks, about 20 centimeters across, of industrial sapphire. On one side, text or images are etched in platinum. Patrick Charton of the French nuclear waste management agency ANDRA says a single disk can store 40,000 miniaturized pages – and then the two disks are molecularly fused together. All a future archaeologist would need to read them is a microscope. The disks have been immersed in acid to test their durability and to simulate aging.