The unknown crypt in the Arctic where the cultural legacy of mankind is kept
Just outside the northernmost city in the world, hidden in the depths of an old Mine in the Arctic, a digital file repository protects some of the most valuable works in the world – from ancient Vatican manuscripts to the code of the Android operating system.
It is the Arctic Arctic Archive (Arctic Archive AWA), located outside the town of Longiarbien (image above), the largest settlement of Spitsberg, the only residential island in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.
Governments, organizations and individuals pay for copying their files to special photographic films designed to withstand centuries or millennia.
The entrance of the underground installation is on the slope of a mountain (ESA/AWA)
« It’s a place that ensures that information survives in time, » he tells Bbc Rune Biekestrad, founder of PIQL, to which the underground installation belongs.
Piql inspired their creation by World Bank of Svalbard Seedsa stockpile of global biopolitics of plants, which is a few hundred meters away.
Subpecific files are stored in special photographic film (BBC)
AWA is on the edge of an old gallery that reaches a depth of 300 meters on the slope of a mountain. Even if all the ice of the Arctic melts, Piql argues, the digital crypt will remain at below zero degrees Celsius.
Svalbard is « far from everything. Far from wars, crises, terrorist actions disasters. There is no safer place! » said Biekestrad.
Behind the heavy metal door of the AWA, the metal envelopes containing the bobbins are kept in containers.
The files are coded and imprinted in the film as icon -like images. The information is « impossible » to delete, alter or to be tired, the persons assure.
In the event that someone finds the bobbins in the distant future, the films include images with instructions to decipher the files.
When the installation was inaugurated in 2017, the governments of Norway, Brazil and Mexico stored copies of various historical documents there.
Bobbins with valuable files are stored in metal folders (AWA)
Since then, more than 100 collections have been stored from more than 30 countries. Among them, three -dimensional models of Taz Mahal, volumes from the Vatican Library, photos of the land from space, and even copies of the scream, the famous painting of Norwegian Zografos Envard Munk.
The US software company GitHub, which has stored all its open code, such as programming languages and tools of AI, also rented the Arctic Archive Archive. The first bobbin placed in the crypt contained the Linux and Android code.
New material is deposited in the repository three times a year. According to the BBC, the latest bobbins contain, among other things, recordings of threatened known and handwritten chickens.
