Continuity Research Facility Charlie

Overview

Continuity Research Facility Charlie (CRF-C) is the Department's site for long-duration information preservation. It stores copies of selected collections in forms that should remain recoverable for 100 years or more, even if the site loses power, staff and maintenance. That design objective, unpowered survivability, separates Charlie from the other two facilities, which depend on active power and cooling.

Three site characteristics led to its selection in interior Alaska: a cold mean annual temperature, which slows the chemical degradation of most archival media; a low seismic hazard at the specific site, confirmed by site-specific investigation in a state where hazard varies widely over short distances; and distance from population centers, transport corridors and industrial hazards.

Site characterization was carried out in 2025 under an interagency preservation pilot during the ITFCC period. The site transferred to the Department in February 2026. Archival operations have run under the Long-Duration Information Preservation Program since May 2026. On 1 September 2026, construction of the main vault was brought under the Continuity Infrastructure Initiative.

Research focus

Facility Charlie is both an archive and an experiment. Its holdings are a third, geographically separate tier of the Department's preservation copies, after Facility Bravo’s primary archive and Facility Alpha’s working archive. It is also the site where CIA-DSC and the Office of Long-Term Systems Research test whether information can be preserved over spans longer than the life of any institution or technology now in use.

Research questions

• How do candidate long-duration media age under cold, unconditioned storage, compared with accelerated-aging predictions? The media assessment in DSC-TR-2026-005 set the test matrix.
• What recovery documentation must accompany an archive so that a future reader without today’s equipment, software or institutional knowledge can decode it?
• How should collections be selected and packaged for a store that may not be read for decades, including neural datasets prepared under the draft Neural Data Preservation Framework?
• What failure modes appear when a facility runs with minimal staffing, intermittent power and seasonal access limits, and how should redundant systems be designed around them?

Results are reported through the Long-Duration Information Preservation Program. Media aging data from the pilot vault will be published once a full year of measurements exists.

Technical capabilities

Media tiers

Unpowered survivability

The long-duration media are held in passive chambers that operate in two modes. With power available, the chambers are kept at 2 °C ±2 °C and 30 percent relative humidity. Without power, they rely on construction alone: heavily insulated, high-thermal-mass walls damp the outdoor seasonal swing, and media are stored in sealed enclosures with conditioned humidity buffers that hold internal relative humidity between 25 and 35 percent. Thermal modeling indicates that an unpowered chamber would track the site's mean annual air temperature, with an interior range of roughly −18 °C to +6 °C. Design checks include regional warming of up to 6 °C by 2100. Within that envelope, the selected media are expected to remain recoverable for well over a century. The modeling will be checked against controlled power-off trials in the pilot vault.

Foundation and thaw monitoring

Thaw-unstable soils under the building footprints were excavated and replaced with non-frost-susceptible engineered fill. The structures stand on steel pipe piles socketed into bedrock, with a ventilated air gap between the floor and the ground surface so that building heat does not reach the soil. Passive thermosyphons at the perimeter slow ground warming, but the structural design does not rely on them. Ground temperatures are recorded by thermistor strings in 24 boreholes to depths of up to 20 m, and settlement is surveyed each month. Both are reviewed against design thresholds.

Operations, safety and environmental compliance

In normal operation the site draws on a single regional utility feed, backed by on-site generation and battery storage sized to carry the active tier through extended outages. Outside air cools the active tier for most of the year, and recovered heat warms occupied spaces. Construction is limited to the summer season, and work areas are managed under a wildlife and wetlands plan agreed through the applicable federal environmental review. Cold-weather occupational safety procedures apply to all staff and contractors.

Specifications