Go to the Arctic Vault, which is getting back-up of great works

High above the Arctic Circle, the archipelad of Swalbard is on the halfway between the mainland Norway and the North Pole.

Frozen, hill and remote, it is home to a couple of hundreds of polar bears and sparse settlements.

One of them is Longeeerben, the most northern city in the world, and outside the settlement, in a decomized coal mine, the Arctic World Archive (AWA) – an underground vault for data.

Customers pay their data to store on the film and are potentially placed in the vault for hundreds of years.

“There is a place to ensure that information technology avoids untouchability, time and aging. This is our mission,” the founder run Bercestrand, the way forward.

Switching on the head-side, we landed on a dark passage and took the old rail tracks at a distance of 300 meters on the mountain, until we reached the metal door of the collection.

Inside the vault, a shipping container stacked with a silver packet stands, each of which has a reel of the film, on which the data is stored.

“These are a lot of memories, a lot of heritage,” says Mr. Bjerkestrand.

“This is anything from the pieces of digitized art, literature, music, motion picture, you name it.”

Since the launch of Archive, eight years ago, more than 100 have been deposited by institutions, companies and individuals from 30-plus countries.

Many digital artifacts have 3D scans and models of the Taj Mahal; Installment of ancient manuscripts from the Vatican Library; Earth’s satellite observation from space; And by Norway’s valuable painting, The Scream, Edward Munak.

AWA is a commercial operation and the Norwegian data preservation company depends on the technology provided by PIQL, which is also prominent Mr. Bjerkestrand.

It was inspired by global seed vault, a seed bank that is located only a few hundred meters away, a repository where crops can be recovered after natural or man -made disasters.

“Today, there are a lot of risks to information and data,” Mr. Bjerkstand said. “Terrorism, war, cyber hackers are.”

According to him, Svalbard is the right place to host a safe data storage feature.

“This is far from all! War, crisis, terrorism, disasters are far away. Can you be safe!”

Underground it is dark, dry and chili, the temperature remains sub-zero throughout the year; The conditions of Shri Bjerkestrand’s claim are ideal for keeping the film safe for centuries.

Should thick arctic permifrost be melted due to global warming, the vault is still strong enough to preserve its content.

Behind the chamber, another large metal box consists of the code vault of the Github.

Software developer has stored hundreds of reels of open source code here, which are building blocks outlining computer operating systems, software, websites and apps.

Every active public repository on the platform written by programming language, AI tools, and its 150 million users is also stored here.

“It is incredibly important for humanity to secure the future of software,” Kyle Dagle, Chief Operating Officer of Githhab, told BBC, it has become very important for our day -day life. “

His firm has discovered a variety of long -term storage solutions, he said, and challenges. “Some of our existing mechanisms can be stored for a very long time, but you need technology to read them.”

At the headquarters of PIQL in Southern Norway, data files have been encoded on a photosensitive film.

“There is a sequence of data bits and bytes,” senior product developer, Alexi Mantsev, as the film went through a spool on its fingers.

“We change the sequence of the bits that come to images from our customers’ data. Every image [or frame] There are about eight million pixels. ,

Once these images are exposed and developed, the processed film looks gray, but more closely seen, it is similar to the mass of the small QR code.

Information cannot be removed or replaced, and easily explains to recover Shri Mantsev.

“We can scan it back, and decode the data in the same way as reading data from the hard drive, but we will read data from the film.”

An important question generated with long -term storage methods is whether people will understand what has been preserved and how to recover it for centuries in the future.

This is a landscape PIQL has also thought, and therefore a guide that can be extended and can be read alternately is also printed on the film.

More data is being used every day and is being produced more than ever, but experts have long warned Possible “Digital Dark Age”As technological progresses presents previous software and hardware obsolete.

This may mean that the files and formats we use now face fate similar to the past floppy disk and DVD drive.

Many firms offer long -term data storage.

Magnetic tape cassettes of magnetic tape known as LTO (linear tape open) are the most common forms, but new innovations promise to revolutionize how we preserve information.

For example, Microsoft’s project Silica has developed 2 mm-ride PANs of the glass, on which the piece of data is transferred by powerful lasers.

Meanwhile, a team of scientists at the University of Southhampton has created a so -called 5D memory crystal, which has saved the record of human genome.

It is also kept in Memory of mankind storesAnother vault is the protection of historical documents, hidden in a salt mine in Austria.

The Arctic World Archive is deposited three times a year, and as the BBC visited, the recording of endangered languages ​​and the manuscripts of music composer Chopin, were among the latest reels placed in the vault.

Photographers, Christian Clovers, which is a documentation of the increase in sea level, is also adding their work.

“I deposited the footage and photography, visual witnesses from the martial islands,” they say.

“The highest point of the island is three meters, and they are facing a huge impact of climate change.”

“It was really humble and real,” after submitting the records, engineers’ pictures and photos of historical car models, called Joan Shortland, the leading archives of the heritage collections at the Jawahar Demler Heritage Trust.

“I have all these formats that are becoming obsolete.

“You need to change the file format and make sure that it is accessible in 20 or 30, years. There are a lot of problems in the digital world.”