Deep-freeze data that will last 1,000 years

The Arctic World Archive may be the best place to begin building an authoritative history of humans

Longyearbyen, located on the west coast of the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in Svalbard, is cold. It always is: the average temperature there is -5°C. In fact, the average is -13°C for three months from January to March, climbing to a tropical 7°C in July. It has a population of under 3,000 people, a single-screen cinema that plays films on Wednesdays and Sundays, and a school whose 270 students show up for their first day in August in mittens and hats. When school trips head into the mountains, teachers carry rifles to account for the risk of polar bears.

It’s also a place that, in a thousand years, might provide archaeologists with the most accurate clues as to what 21st century society was like. Inside an abandoned mine with an underground vault, a unique, long-term backup effort that so far includes artefacts as diverse as the United Nation’s , sample data acquired by the European Space Agency’s first Earth remote sensing satellite, a digitised copy of Edvard Munch’s and more than 20TB of data from open-source repository GitHub. As humankind grows curious about its ancestors, or, as seems more likely in 2020, emerges blinking from its own preservative bunker to restart civilisation, the Arctic World Archive may be the best place to begin building an authoritative history of humans – or the perfect