Just outside the world’s northernmost city, hidden deep in an old mine in the Arctic, a digital archive preserves some of the world’s most valuable works—from ancient Vatican manuscripts to the code for the Android operating system.
It’s the Arctic World Archive (AWA), located outside the town of Longyearbyen (pictured above), the largest settlement on Spitsbergen, the only inhabited island in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.
Governments, organizations, and individuals pay to have their archives copied onto reels of special photographic film designed to last for centuries or millennia.
Piql, the company that owns the underground facility, was inspired to create them by the Svalbard Global Seed Bank, a repository of global plant biodiversity, which is located a few hundred meters away.
The AWA is located at the edge of an old tunnel that reaches a depth of 300 meters in a mountainside. Even if all the Arctic ice melts, Piql claims, the digital vault will remain at a temperature below zero degrees Celsius.
Svalbard is far from everything. Far from wars, crises, terrorist attacks, disasters. There is no safer place!
Behind the heavy metal door of the AWA, the metal folders containing the reels are stored in containers.
The files are encoded and imprinted on the film as images that look like QR codes. The information is “impossible” to delete, alter or hack, the people responsible assure.
In case someone finds the reels in the distant future, the films include images with instructions for decrypting the files.
When the facility opened in 2017, the governments of Norway, Brazil, and Mexico stored copies of various historical documents there.
Since then, more than 100 collections from more than 30 countries have been stored there. Among them are 3D models of the Taj Mahal, volumes from the Vatican Library, photographs of the Earth from space, and even copies of The Scream, the famous painting by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch.
The Global Arctic Archive is also rented by the American software company GitHub, which has stored all of its open source code there, including programming languages and AI tools. The first reel placed in the vault contained the code for Linux and Android.
New material is deposited into the repository three times a year. The most recent reels contain, among other things, recordings of endangered celebrities and Chopin manuscripts.
