Arctic World Archive


The Arctic World Archive is a facility for data preservation in Svalbard, Norway, operated by the Norwegian data-storage company Piql and the state-owned coal-mining company Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani. It was opened on March 27, 2017.
The facility is located approximately below ground inside an abandoned coal mine in a mountain on the island of Spitsbergen. Because of the island's Arctic climate and resulting permafrost, even if the power to the facility failed, the temperature inside the vault will remain below freezing—enough to preserve the vault's contents for decades or more. Data is stored offline on digital film that has a reported lifetime of 500 years.
The Svalbard archipelago is declared demilitarized by 42 nations and the company describes the location as "one of the most geopolitically secure places in the world". The vault is situated deep enough that it can avoid damage from nuclear and EMP weapons.
The archive stores data such as a digitized version of The Scream by Edvard Munch for the National Museum of Norway and a digitised version of The Divine Comedy for the Vatican Library. In March 2018 German science TV show Galileo deposited their first show and made a documentary about it for ProSieben. In November 2019, GitHub announced that all of its public open source code would be archived at the Arctic World Archive. In July 2020, the 21TB February site archive was stored at the AWA.