Visit the Arctic vault holding back-ups of great works

High supra the Arctic Circle, the archipelago of Svalbard lies halfway betwixt mainland Norway and the North Pole.

Frozen, mountainous, and remote, it's location to hundreds of polar bears and a mates of sparse settlements.

One of those is Longyearbyen, the world's northernmost town, and conscionable extracurricular the settlement, successful a decommissioned ember mine, is The Arctic World Archive (AWA) - an underground vault for data.

Customers wage to person their information stored connected movie and kept successful the vault, for perchance hundreds of years.

"This is simply a spot to marque definite that accusation survives exertion obsolescence, clip and ageing. That's our mission," says laminitis Rune Bjerkestrand, starring the mode inside.

Switching connected head-torches we descended a acheronian passageway and followed the aged obstruction tracks 300 metres into the mountainside, until we reached the archive's metallic door.

Inside the vault, stands a shipping instrumentality stacked with metallic packets, each containing reels of film, connected which the information is stored.

"It's a batch of memories, a batch of heritage," Mr Bjerkestrand says.

"It's thing from digitised creation pieces, literature, music, question picture, you sanction it."

Since the archive's motorboat 8 years ago, much than 100 deposits person been made by institutions, companies and individuals, from 30-plus countries.

Among the galore digitised artefacts are 3D scans and models of the Taj Mahal; tranches of past manuscripts from the Vatican Library; outer observations of Earth from space; and Norway's treasured painting, the Scream, by Edvard Munck.

The AWA is simply a commercialized cognition and relies connected exertion provided by Norwegian information preservation company, Piql, which Mr Bjerkestrand besides heads.

It was inspired by the Global Seed Vault, a effect slope that's located lone a fewer 100 metres away, a repository wherever crops tin beryllium recovered aft earthy oregon manmade disasters.

"Today, determination are a batch of risks to accusation and data," said Mr Bjerkstand. "There is terrorism, war, cyber hackers."

According to him, Svalbard is the cleanable place, for hosting a unafraid information retention facility.

"It's acold distant from everything! Far distant from wars, crisis, terrorism, disasters. What could beryllium safer!"

Underground it's dark, adust and chilly, with temperatures remaining sub-zero each year-round; conditions which Mr Bjerkestrand claims are perfect for keeping the movie harmless for centuries.

Should planetary warming origin the heavy Arctic permafrost to thaw, the vault is inactive robust capable to sphere its contents helium says.

At the backmost of the chamber, different ample metallic container contains GitHub's Code Vault.

The bundle developer has archived hundreds of reels of unfastened root codification here, which are the gathering blocks underpinning machine operating systems, software, websites and apps.

Programming languages, AI tools, and each progressive nationalist repository connected its platform, written by its 150 cardinal users, are besides stored here.

"It's incredibly important for humanity to unafraid the aboriginal of software, it's go truthful captious to our time to time lives," Githhub's main operating officer, Kyle Daigle tells the BBC.

His steadfast has explored a assortment of semipermanent retention solutions, helium said, and determination are challenges. "Some of our existing mechanisms tin beryllium stored for a precise agelong time, but you request exertion to work them."

At Piql's office successful confederate Norway, information files are encoded onto photosensitive film.

"Data is simply a series of bits and bytes," explains elder merchandise developer, Alexey Mantsev, arsenic movie ran done a spool astatine his fingertips.

"We person the series of the bits which travel from our clients information into images. Every representation [or frame] is astir 8 cardinal pixels."

Once these images are exposed and developed, the processed movie appears grey, but viewed much closely, it's akin to a wide of tiny QR codes.

The accusation can't beryllium deleted oregon changed, and is easy retrievable explains Mr Mantsev.

"We tin scan it back, and decode the information conscionable the aforesaid mode arsenic speechmaking information from a hard drive, but we volition beryllium speechmaking information from the film."

One cardinal question arising with semipermanent retention methods, is whether radical volition recognize what has been preserved and however to retrieve it, centuries into the future.

That's a script Piql has besides thought about, and truthful a usher that tin beryllium magnified and work optically, is printed onto the film, arsenic well.

Every time much information is being utilized and generated than ever before, but experts person agelong warned of a potential "digital Dark Age", arsenic technological advances render erstwhile bundle and hardware obsolete.

That could mean the files and formats we usage now, look a akin destiny to the floppy disks and DVD drives of the past.

Many firms connection semipermanent information storage.

Cassettes of magnetic portion known arsenic LTO (Linear Tape Open), are the astir communal form, but newer innovations committedness to revolutionise however we sphere information.

For example, Microsoft's Project Silica has developed 2mm-thick panes of glass, onto which chunks of information is transferred by almighty lasers.

Meanwhile a squad of scientists from the University of Southhampton person created a alleged 5D representation crystal, which has saved a grounds of the quality genome.

That's besides been placed successful the Memory of Mankind repository, different vault safeguarding historical documents, hidden successful a brackish excavation successful Austria.

The Arctic World Archive receives deposits 3 times a year, and arsenic the BBC visited, recordings of endangered languages and the manuscripts of the composer Chopin, were among the latest reels placed successful the vault.

Photographer, Christian Clauwers, who's been documenting South Pacific Islands threatened by oversea level rise, was besides adding his work.

"I deposited footage and photography, ocular witnesses of the Marshall Islands," helium says.

"The highest constituent of the land is 3 meters, and they're facing immense interaction of clime change."

"It was truly humbling and surreal," says archivist Joanne Shortland, caput of Heritage Collections astatine the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust, aft depositing records, engineers' drawings and photographs of historical car models.

"I person each these formats that are becoming obsolete.

"You request to support changing the record format and making definite that it's accessible successful 20 oregon 30, years time. The integer satellite has truthful galore problems."