Deep Inside the Arctic: Svalbard Vault Safeguards Humanity’s Digital Legacy for Centuries

Hadisur Rahman, JadeTimes Staff

H. Rahman is a Jadetimes news reporter covering Business

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Image Source: Adrienne Murray

Tucked away in a frozen mountain high above the Arctic Circle lies the Arctic World Archive (AWA), a unique global vault preserving digital history for future generations. Located in a decommissioned coal mine just outside Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost town, this subterranean facility is designed to protect critical data from the threats of time, technology obsolescence, and global catastrophe.

The AWA, established eight years ago, stores digital information on long-lasting photosensitive film, ensuring its survival for potentially hundreds of years. The project was inspired by the nearby Global Seed Vault, which preserves agricultural biodiversity. The Arctic World Archive, however, secures the digital heritage of humanity from art and literature to scientific research and open-source code.

“This is a place to make sure that information survives technology obsolescence, time, and ageing. That’s our mission,” said Rune Bjerkestrand, founder of the archive and head of Norwegian data preservation company Piql.

Entering the vault involves a 300-meter journey through dark passageways inside the mountain, guided only by headlamps. There, metallic containers house silver packets reels of specially encoded film that contain invaluable information.

Among the more than 100 contributions made by organizations from over 30 countries are 3D scans of the Taj Mahal, manuscripts from the Vatican Library, satellite imagery, and Edvard Munch’s The Scream. GitHub has also deposited its Code Vault a comprehensive archive of open-source software, programming languages, and tools created by its 150 million users.

“It’s incredibly important for humanity to secure the future of software. It’s become so critical to our day-to-day lives,” said GitHub COO Kyle Daigle.

At Piql’s facility in southern Norway, digital data is converted into images and printed on film, resembling dense QR codes. This analog format is immune to digital corruption, unalterable, and readable without electricity crucial for long-term preservation.

“We convert the sequence of bits into images. Every image is about eight million pixels,” explained Alexey Mantsev, senior product developer at Piql.

To aid future generations in decoding the information, every reel includes an optical guide printed on the film itself.

Amid concerns about a potential “digital Dark Age” where outdated software and formats render information unreadable the AWA’s analog solution stands out. With climate change, cyber threats, and war posing risks to data integrity, Bjerkestrand argues Svalbard is the ideal location: isolated, geologically stable, and perpetually cold.

The archive receives deposits three times a year. Recent additions include endangered language recordings, works by composer Frédéric Chopin, and environmental documentation from the Marshall Islands by photographer Christian Clauwers.

“It was really humbling and surreal,” said Joanne Shortland of the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust, who deposited historic automotive records. “The digital world has so many problems. You need to keep changing the file format and ensuring it’s accessible over decades.”

As technology evolves rapidly, the Arctic World Archive offers a timeless solution: a secure, analog sanctuary preserving the essence of humanity in a fragile digital age.