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).
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the Arctic World Archive on 27 March 2017, the Brazilian, Mexican and Norwegian governments deposited copies of various historical documents in the vault.[1][2][3]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".[citation needed] It is an incomplete but more secure snapshot of data, with archiving intended at five-year intervals.[7]
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]
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]
