Mountains of Data: The Physical Reality of the Virtual World
Part One: Facts and Tilden
In this technologically pervasive society, there are gizmos to let you know where your missing keys are, and earbuds that serve as geolocators, but to my knowledge, no “fact-finders.” I wanted something that could alert me to where some information that I was looking for was. I wanted simple confirmation of one rumored fact. Too much to ask? Here’s some backstory.
Pure Michigan. This well-deserved tagline boasts of the abundance of natural beauty and diversity in Michigan, but one thing the state doesn’t have is the topographic grandeur of mountain ranges like the Cascades or Appalachians. It isn’t flat though. The Upper Peninsula’s Mount Curwood, a gently sloping crest amongst the Huron Mountain range, rises one-thousand, nine-hundred and seventy-eight feet above sea level. It had been considered the highest point in Michigan since sometime around the 1930s, when Governors Peak was dethroned.
In 1982, it lost its standing as the highest point in Michigan. Six miles northeast of Curwood, about halfway between Copper Harbor and Marquette, lies a patch of land owned by the American timber-giant, Weyerhaeuser. Mount Arvon, situated on that land, was surveyed at 1979.238 feet above sea level. Less than two feet higher than Curwood. Curwood, the King, the destination, is now Curwood, off-the beaten path.
Interestingly, Arvon may not even hold the title legitimately. This is the alleged fact that spurred this writing. I came across reports revealing that, technically, the highest point in Michigan is a man-made creation close to Ishpeming, rising 2,000 feet above sea level. This massive heap of rock, the Tilden stockpile, is the result of the open-pit, terraforming, behemoth Tilden mine, where ore is drilled, blasted and loaded from the earth, processed on site, and transported by rail in pelletized form to the Marquette docks. The 320-ton trucks used to shuttle the materials are the size of houses. The tires themselves are 12 feet tall. Those sound like the makings of the highest point in the state.
I tried to run this fact by NOAA, who referred me to USGS, who I’m still waiting to hear from. I also left several voicemail messages with the crew at Tilden. I suspect that it’s simply speculation picked up from the 1989 four-book, two-volume collection Superior Heartland: A Backwoods History by Fred Rydholm. From there, perhaps the rumor was repeated on web forums, picked up by a news outlet or two, and possibly at some point commented upon in a since-removed post by NOAA. But I don’t know that for certain.
I do know that the Tilden mine pit itself was one thousand nine hundred-eighty feet deep as of January of 2021 — a mountain inverted. A massive chasm descending deep into the earth’s crust — a reminder of the material harvest that our society’s infrastructure is built upon (Mining Data Solutions, Tilden Mine).
Amongst the abundance of data available today, searches for information like mine exemplify our insatiable desire for more. Just how much processed information already exists out there? It’s murky. Statistics honing in on information transfers originating from phones, computers and mobile networks in Michigan are impossible to find. Data from fixed-line networks must be considered too, and quantification begins to look Sisyphean. Without question, however, the amount of data processed throughout the world is mind-boggling. The forecasted amount of data “created, captured, copied and consumed worldwide” last year was ninety-seven zettabytes. That number was up by a third from what was processed in 2020 (64.2 ZB.) Unfamiliar with zettabytes? One “ZB” is equal to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. That’s about the same as the number of stars in the observable universe. And like the universe, this number of processed bytes is projected to expand rapidly, nearly doubling to a staggering 181 zettabytes by 2025.
These bytes allow for GPS functionality, atomic level research, “full self-driving cars,” targeted advertisements, machine automation, global climate model creation, architectural rendering, shipping optimization, robot surgeries, seeing eye doorbells and speaking to loved ones half a world away. They enabled me to pull the above numbers together, and if trends in AI and supercomputing continue, they’ll know what information I’d like to see long before I even consider it. The inkling of images we have of the very number of stars in the galaxy stems from advances in storing and communicating data. And if you find yourself at the Tilden mine, you’ll find hulking trucks guided by GPS and computers twenty-four seven — the power of data, reshaping the earth, one one hundred twenty-ton bucket load at a time.
It’s easy to think that all of this information, which clearly is shaping our lived experience every single day, exists in our heads, and in “the cloud,” and on tiny footprint-free microchips. It’s just kind of out there, and in us, and it’s affecting us, but the only clear connection to material reality is on the back end. Information shapes the earth, but information doesn’t need the earth.
There’s the rub. The Komatsu hauler’s 10,000 lb tires crush the notion of an ethereal cloud of data and information that exists outside the bounds of time, space and the material world. Storage of data requires physical infrastructure. You can find the locations of a sampling of data centers near you in this directory. You can see their street addresses. Brick and mortar.
Stay tuned for part 2.
