Gallery: The Magnificent Refuges That Hide Humanity’s Information
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The Pionen data center in Stockholm, Sweden houses data in a former national defense facility.
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The Stockholm Public Library holds over 2 million volumes of books and 2.4 million audiotapes.
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The Bahnhof data center in Kista, Sweden is modeled to look like a space station, housing servers within bullet-proof steel.
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The Monastery of Montserrat in Spain holds 1,500 theological manuscripts.
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The Sabey Data Center in New York City is a 1-million-square-foot high-rise facility.
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In the Arnano lab in Grenoble, France, machines engrave thousands of pages of text onto a 12-inch-wide disc crafted from synthetic sapphire.
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This vault in the Swiss Federal Office of Metrology in Bern, Switzerland contains a copy of the prototype kilogram, which still defines the weight of the base unit.
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The Large Hadron Collider produces 30 petabytes of data per year, stored in the 10,000 servers in the 15,600-square-foot main room at the CERN Data Center in Geneva, Switzerland.
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The Brussels regional traffic agency stored plans for the Reyers Bridge in the pillars of the bridge itself.
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The Pionen Data Center in Stockholm, Sweden is buried under 100 feet of granite and protected by a 15-inch-thick steel door. It used to be a national defense center, and is now used by Swedish internet provider Bahnhof to store digital data.
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At the CERN Data Center, 10,000 servers hold 30 petabytes of data. These backup generators shut down the system if there's an electrical network problem.
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This atomic clock, located at the Swiss Federal Office of Metrology in Bern, Switzerland, operates at an uncertainty of one second every 30 million years.
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The outside of the Google Data Center in Baudour, Belgium, protected by a fence and hidden by woods and artificial dunes.
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The Mundaneum in Mons, Belgium, created by Belgian lawyers in 1910, houses over 12 million index cards, designed to house all the world's information.
