Arctic World Archive

Last updated

Arctic World Archive
Arctic World Archive Logo.svg
Svalbard location map conic.svg
Red pog.svg
Location within Svalbard
General information
StatusCompleted
Type Archive
Location Spitsbergen
AddressVei 706
Town or city Longyearbyen
Country Norway
Coordinates 78°14′17.9″N15°26′49.5″E / 78.238306°N 15.447083°E / 78.238306; 15.447083
Elevation130 m (430 ft)
OpenedMarch 27, 2017;7 years ago (2017-03-27)
Website
Official website

The Arctic World Archive (AWA) is a facility for data preservation, located in the Svalbard archipelago on the island of Spitsbergen, Norway, not far from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It contains data of historical and cultural interest from several countries, as well as all of American multinational company GitHub's open source code, in a deeply buried steel vault, with the data storage medium expected to last for 500 to 1,000 years. It is run as a profit-making business by private company Piql and the state-owned coal-mining company Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani (SNSK).

Contents

History

Piql is a Norwegian data-storage company that specialises in long-term storage of digital media. Piql and SNSK created the deeply buried steel vault out of a mineshaft of an abandoned coal mine. At the time of its opening as the Arctic World Archive on 27 March 2017, the Brazilian, Mexican and Norwegian governments deposited copies of various historical documents in the vault. [1] [2] [3]

Description

The Svalbard archipelago, situated north of mainland Norway, about 970 kilometres (600 mi) from the North Pole, [4] is declared demilitarised by 42 nations, as established in the Svalbard Treaty signed after World War I. [1] This means that the territory cannot be used for military purposes, and the company describes the location as "one of the most geopolitically secure places in the world". [5] [6] The archive facility is on Spitsbergen, the biggest island in Svalbard. [7]

The facility is a large steel vault [7] located somewhere between 150 metres (490 ft) [5] and 300 metres (980 ft) below the ground or permafrost [7] [4] inside an abandoned coal mine (Store Norske Gruve 3) that reaches over 300 metres (980 ft) into the side of a mountain. [5] [8] [9] The facility is secured with a concrete wall and a steel gate. The deposits themselves are stored in secure shipping containers behind the gate. [10]

Because of the island's Arctic climate and resulting permafrost, even if the power to the facility failed, the temperature inside the vault would remain below freezing point, which is cold enough to preserve the vault's contents for decades or more, [5] with the vault 250 metres (820 ft) below the permafrost. [7] The vault is situated deeply enough to avoid damage even from nuclear and EMP weapons. [8]

Storage and future use

Data is stored offline on film reels made using a refined version of ordinary darkroom photography technology. [1] [4] The film is made of polyester coated in silver halide crystals [7] and powder-coated with iron oxide, and has a life span of at least 500 and possibly up to 2,000 years, if stored in optimum conditions. [6]

The level of security of the data represents the "cold layer" of archiving. The "hot" (accessible online repositories) and "warm" (e.g. Internet Archive) layers both have the weakness of being founded upon electronics  – both would be wiped out in a repeat of the 19th-century geomagnetic storm known as the "Carrington Event". It is an incomplete but more secure snapshot of data, with archiving intended at five-year intervals. [7]

Realising that people in the very far future may not understand what they see in the vault, a kind of "Rosetta Stone" has been devised to help decode the data, in the form of a guide to interpreting the archive. The guides are all readable by eye, after magnification, and written in English, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, and Hindi. [7]

Process

Clients who pay for the storage of data can send their data digitally or physically. The data can be retrieved at any time from the vault, but it is not a quick process, because the data is not connected to the internet. If data is requested, the relevant reel of film has to be manually retrieved, [1] then uploaded via a fibre optic connection to the mainland, to Piql's headquarters in Drammen; [4] the fastest possible retrieval time is 20–30 minutes, but it can take up to 24 hours with an active subscription and up to 72 hours without an active subscription. [1] [11]

Contents

The archive stores a wide range of historical and cultural data. [7] Governments, researchers, religious institutions, media companies and others store some of their most significant records in the vault; Brazil and Norway have archived their constitutions and other important historical papers. [4]

The archive includes information about the biodiversity of Australia, and examples of culturally significant Australian works. It includes the Atlas of Living Australia, and machine learning models created by Geoscience Australia, which assist in understanding topics such as bushfires and climate change. [7]

The archive includes a digitised version of the painting The Scream by Edvard Munch for the National Museum of Norway, and a digitised version of Dante's master-work of Italian literature, The Divine Comedy for the Vatican Library. [12]

In March 2018, German science TV show Galileo deposited their first show, and made a documentary about it for ProSieben. [13] [14]

In October 2020, the first deposit from a Nobel Prize laureate went to the Archive: 14 books of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, Olga Tokarczuk, were placed on PiqlFilm, undertaken by the Piql Polska and funded by publisher Wydawnictwo Literackie. [15] [16]

GitHub Archive Program

In November 2019, GitHub (which was acquired by Microsoft in 2018 [6] ) announced that all of its public open source code would be archived in a code vault at the Arctic World Archive, [17] [18] as part of its GitHub Archive Program. [7]

In July 2020, the 21TB February site archive was stored at the AWA. [19] [20] The data is stored on 186 film reels measuring 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) long, covered in code stored as matrix (2D) barcode (Boxing barcode), which store data very densely (each of the 200 platters of data carry 120 gigabytes [6] ). The amount of code stored has been described thus: "If someone who types at about 60 words a minute sat down and tried to fill up all that space, it would take 111,300 years". [7] The first reel holds the code of both the Linux and Android operating systems, plus that of 6,000 other major open source applications. [6]

Further to the general guide to the vault, the "Tech Tree" details software development, programming languages and other information about computer programming. [7] The Guide and the Tech Tree are written in a collaborative process as a public Git repository. [21]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Svalbard</span> Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean

Svalbard, previously known as Spitsbergen or Spitzbergen, is a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. North of mainland Europe, it lies about midway between the northern coast of Norway and the North Pole. The islands of the group range from 74° to 81° north latitude, and from 10° to 35° east longitude. The largest island is Spitsbergen, followed in size by Nordaustlandet and Edgeøya. The largest settlement is Longyearbyen on the west coast of Spitsbergen.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spitsbergen</span> Largest island of the Svalbard archipelago in northern Norway

Spitsbergen is the largest and the only permanently populated island of the Svalbard archipelago in northern Norway in the Arctic Ocean.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bear Island (Svalbard)</span> Southernmost island of Svalbard, Norway

Bear Island is the southernmost island of the Norwegian Svalbard archipelago. The island is located at the limits of the Norwegian and Barents seas, approximately halfway between Spitsbergen and the North Cape. Bear Island was discovered by Dutch explorers Willem Barentsz and Jacob van Heemskerck on 10 June 1596. It was named after a polar bear that was seen swimming nearby. The island was considered terra nullius until the Spitsbergen Treaty of 1920 placed it under Norwegian sovereignty.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Svalbard and Jan Mayen</span> Two parts of Norway under separate jurisdictions

Svalbard and Jan Mayen is a statistical designation defined by ISO 3166-1 for a collective grouping of two remote jurisdictions of Norway: Svalbard and Jan Mayen. While the two are combined for the purposes of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) category, they are not administratively related. This has further resulted in the country code top-level domain .sj being issued for Svalbard and Jan Mayen, and ISO 3166-2:SJ. The United Nations Statistics Division also uses this code, but has named it the Svalbard and Jan Mayen Islands.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Longyearbyen</span> Largest settlement and administrative centre of Svalbard, Norway

Longyearbyen is the world's northernmost settlement with a population greater than 1,000, and the largest inhabited area of Svalbard, Norway. It stretches along the foot of the left bank of the Longyear Valley and on the shore of Adventfjorden, the short estuary leading into Isfjorden on the west coast of Spitsbergen, the island's broadest inlet. As of 2002 Longyearbyen Community Council became an official Norwegian municipality. It is the seat of the Governor of Svalbard. The town's mayor is Arild Olsen.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ny-Ålesund</span> Town in Svalbard, Norway

Ny-Ålesund is a small town in Oscar II Land on the island of Spitsbergen in Svalbard, Norway. It is situated on the Brøgger peninsula (Brøggerhalvøya) and on the shore of the bay of Kongsfjorden. The company town is owned and operated by Kings Bay, which provides facilities for permanent research activities by 19 institutions from 11 countries. The town is ultimately owned by the Ministry of Climate and Environment and is not incorporated. Ny-Ålesund has an all-year permanent population of 30 to 35, with the summer population reaching 114. Its facilities include Ny-Ålesund Airport, Hamnerabben, Svalbard Rocket Range, a port and Ny-Ålesund Town and Mine Museum, as well as a number of buildings dedicated to research and environmental monitoring activities. It is the northernmost functional civilian settlement in the world.

Barentsburg is the second-largest settlement in Svalbard, Norway, with about 455 inhabitants (2020). A coal mining town, the settlement was almost entirely made up of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. With the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, most of the Ukrainian citizens were reported to have left.

The polar archipelago of Svalbard was first discovered by Willem Barentsz in 1596, although there is disputed evidence of use by Pomors or Norsemen. Whaling for bowhead whales started in 1611, dominated by English and Dutch companies, though other countries participated. At that time there was no agreement about sovereignty. Whaling stations, the largest being Smeerenburg, were built during the 17th century, but gradually whaling decreased. Hunting was carried out from the 17th century by Pomors, but from the 19th century it became more dominated by Norwegians.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Svalbard Treaty</span> Treaty recognising Norwegian sovereignty over the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard

The Svalbard Treaty recognises the sovereignty of Norway over the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, at the time called Spitsbergen. The exercise of sovereignty is, however, subject to certain stipulations, and not all Norwegian law applies. The treaty restricts military uses of the archipelago, but it is not demilitarized. The signatories were given equal rights to engage in commercial activities on the islands. As of 2024, Norway and Russia make use of this right.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pyramiden</span> Ghost town in Svalbard, Norway

Pyramiden is an abandoned Soviet coal mining settlement on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard which has become a tourist destination. Founded by Sweden in 1910 and sold to the Soviet Union in 1927, Pyramiden was closed in 1998 and has since remained largely abandoned with most of its infrastructure and buildings still in place, the cold climate preserving much of the infrastructure left behind.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Svalbard Global Seed Vault</span> Globally accessible seed bank on Spitsbergen, Svalbard, Norway

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a secure backup facility for the world's crop diversity on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago. The Seed Vault provides long-term storage for duplicates of seeds from around the world, conserved in gene banks. This provides security of the world's food supply against the loss of seeds in genebanks due to mismanagement, accident, equipment failures, funding cuts, war, sabotage, disease, and natural disasters. The Seed Vault is managed under terms spelled out in a tripartite agreement among the Norwegian government, the Crop Trust, and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center (NordGen).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani</span> Norwegian coal mining company

Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani (SNSK), or simply Store Norske, is a Norwegian coal mining company based on the Svalbard archipelago. It was formed in 1916, after a Norwegian purchase of the American Arctic Coal Company (ACC).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GitHub</span> Hosting service for software projects

GitHub is a developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage and share their code. It uses Git software, providing the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Climate of Svalbard</span>

Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. The climate of Svalbard is principally a result of its latitude, which is between 74° and 81° north. Climate is defined by the World Meteorological Organization as the average weather over a 30-year period. The North Atlantic Current moderates Svalbard's temperatures, particularly during winter, giving it up to 20 °C (36 °F) higher winter temperature than similar latitudes in continental Russia and Canada. This keeps the surrounding waters open and navigable most of the year. The interior fjord areas and valleys, sheltered by the mountains, have fewer temperature differences than the coast, with about 2 °C lower summer temperatures and 3 °C higher winter temperatures. On the south of the largest island, Spitsbergen, the temperature is slightly higher than further north and west. During winter, the temperature difference between south and north is typically 5 °C, and about 3 °C in summer. Bear Island (Bjørnøya) has average temperatures even higher than the rest of the archipelago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Operation Fritham</span> Allied military operation during WW2 to secure the coal mines on Spitsbergen in 1942

Operation Fritham was an Allied military operation during the Second World War to secure the coal mines on Spitsbergen, the main island of the Svalbard Archipelago, 650 mi (1,050 km) from the North Pole and about the same distance from Norway. The operation was intended to deny the islands to Nazi Germany.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Economy of Svalbard</span>

The economy of Svalbard is dominated by coal mining, tourism and research. In 2007, there were 484 people working in the mining sector, 211 people working in the tourism sector and 111 people working in the education sector. The same year, mining gave a revenue of 2.008 billion kr, tourism NOK 317 million and research 142 million. In 2006, the average income for economically active people was NOK 494,700, or 23% higher than on the mainland. Almost all housing is owned by the various employers and institutions and rented to their employees; there are only a few privately owned houses, most of which are recreational cabins. Because of this, it is nearly impossible to live on Svalbard without working for an established institution. The Spitsbergen Treaty and Svalbard Act established Svalbard as an economic free zone and demilitarized zone in 1925.

Svalbard is an Arctic, wilderness archipelago comprising the northernmost part of Norway. It is mostly uninhabited, with only about 3,000 people, yet covers an area of 61,020 square kilometres (23,560 sq mi).

Arctic Coal Company was a coal mining company that operated mines at Longyearbyen in Svalbard, Norway, between 1906 and 1916.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Agriculture in Svalbard</span> Svalbards agriculture

Agriculture in Svalbard – the archipelago containing the world's northernmost permanently inhabited settlements – has a short history, and remains a minor economic factor, but has nonetheless had a culturally and socially significant role, as well as an ecologic impact. Svalbard is home to the Global Seed Vault, which serves to protect the world's biological and agricultural diversity. Polar Permaculture Solutions, AS was formed in January 2015. Polar Permaculture has been focused on producing locally grown food in town, and also with composting food waste.

The COVID-19 pandemic in Svalbard is part of the worldwide pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. The virus was confirmed to have reached Svalbard on 6 October 2021.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Vincent, James (4 April 2017). "Keep your data safe from the apocalypse in an Arctic mineshaft". The Verge. Retrieved 13 August 2020.
  2. ↑ NRK (26 March 2017). "Dommedagshvelv åpner på Svalbard" (in Norwegian). Archived from the original on 11 April 2018. Retrieved 16 April 2018.
  3. ↑ "Arctic World Archive - Piql". Archived from the original on 18 April 2018. Retrieved 16 April 2018.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 "Look inside the doomsday vault that may hold the world's most important data". NBC News. 7 June 2017. Retrieved 13 August 2020.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Lawlor, Paul (4 April 2017). "Arctic 'doomsday' vault seeks to protect world's most precious data". CNN. Archived from the original on 18 April 2018. Retrieved 16 April 2018.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 Linder, Courtney (15 November 2019). "Github Code - Storing Code for the Apocalypse". Popular Mechanics. Retrieved 13 August 2020.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Byrne, Nate (12 August 2020). "Buried deep in the ice is the GitHub code vault". ABC News. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 13 August 2020.
  8. 1 2 Kobie, Nicole (3 April 2017). "Norway's Doomsday vault will now store and protect the world's data". Wired UK. ISSN   1357-0978. Archived from the original on 8 November 2019. Retrieved 25 November 2019.
  9. ↑ "Arctic World Archive Puts Data on Ice for 1,000 Years". HowStuffWorks. 4 April 2017. Archived from the original on 2 April 2020. Retrieved 25 November 2019.
  10. ↑ "Diese Kohlemine soll das digitale Erbe der Menschheit schützen". 1E9 (in German). 9 August 2020. Retrieved 10 August 2020.
  11. ↑ "FAQ - Arctic World Archive". arcticworldarchive.org. Retrieved 15 April 2023.
  12. ↑ "Alles van waarde ligt straks in een oude mijnschacht op Spitsbergen". Archived from the original on 18 April 2018. Retrieved 16 April 2018.
  13. ↑ "Galileo - Der Datenbunker Spitzbergen". 19 March 2018. Archived from the original on 18 April 2018. Retrieved 16 April 2018.
  14. ↑ "German TV program on Piql watched by millions". Piql. 19 April 2018. Archived from the original on 21 October 2020. Retrieved 13 August 2020.
  15. ↑ "Nobel Prize laureate stores life's work in the Arctic World Archive". Arctic World Archive. 9 October 2020. Retrieved 11 November 2020.[ permanent dead link ]
  16. ↑ Sabliński, Jędrzej (2 November 2020). "Pamięć absolutna". Polityka (in Polish). 45: 76–77.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  17. ↑ "GitHub will store all of its public open source code in an Arctic vault". Engadget. Archived from the original on 15 November 2019. Retrieved 16 November 2019.
  18. ↑ Vance, Ashley (13 November 2019). "Open Source Code Will Survive the Apocalypse in an Arctic Cave". Bloomberg Businessweek . Archived from the original on 17 November 2019. Retrieved 17 November 2019.
  19. ↑ "GitHub Has Stored Its Code in an Arctic Vault It Hopes Will Last 1,000 Years". Gizmodo. 17 July 2020. Retrieved 18 July 2020.
  20. ↑ "GitHub, the world's largest open-source software site, just had mounds of data stored in the permafrost chamber of an old coal mine deep in an Arctic mountain for 1,000 years". www.msn.com. Retrieved 18 July 2020.
  21. ↑ "github/archive-program: The GitHub Archive Program & Arctic Code Vault". GitHub. 15 October 2020.
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