Inside the Arctic World Archive

A Frozen Backup

The Arctic World Archive (AWA) is often referred to as a “doomsday vault.” The nickname is borrowed from its neighbor, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a facility that stores backup samples of the world’s crop seeds in case of agricultural collapse. AWA evokes a similar goal: to preserve the essential record of civilization in case of catastrophe.

But the “doomsday” label is one Katrine Loen, co-founder of AWA, doesn’t particularly like. “It’s really about what is needed to get the world up and going again,” she says. “I think the awareness of how important it is to keep things other places than up in the sky [in the cloud] is increasing.”

Founded in 2017, AWA now holds deposits from more than 30 countries, including governments, universities, national libraries and corporations. Its contents range from manuscripts and constitutions to digitized artworks and technical documentation. The idea is simple: If networks failed, cloud platforms vanished or a powerful solar storm caused an electromagnetic surge that rendered our devices useless (a real threat, according to a report by the British government) — what would we need to remember, and how would we read it?

The answer, in this case, comes in the form of a specially made analog film. The storage medium, developed by the Norwegian company Piql, is a blend of silver halide crystals and digital encoding at microscopic resolution. Information is written onto the film in both human-readable and machine-readable formats, allowing it to be accessed today or 1,000 years from now. Databases, video files, photographs, documents and audio recordings can all be preserved. The company has even undertaken what Loen calls “accelerated age testing” to determine the film’s longevity.

“Piql ensures that data is protected against time, like aging and obsolescence of technology, and physical and digital threats, like cybercrime, cyberwar and electromagnetic weapons,” says Rune Bjerkestrand, Piql’s founder and managing director.

Unlike traditional storage systems, the film requires no electricity once it’s written. Like magnetic tape, it’s what those in the industry refer to as “cold” storage. Cold storage, however, is still flammable. While none of AWA’s vaults in Svalbard have been affected by disaster, the Svea Nord coal mine in the same region experienced a major underground coal-seam fire in 2005 that burned for over five weeks. Another underground fire was detected in Svalbard in 2006 and again in 2008.

Loen acknowledges that while Piql’s material isn’t indestructible, it is remarkably resilient — particularly against electromagnetic pulses and radiation. In an era when nuclear conflict remains a possibility, those qualities take on added significance. In one test, Piql engineers placed the film inside a nuclear reactor alongside hard drives and other storage media. “It was exposed to a [radiation] dose six times higher than what a human being can take,” Loen recalls. “It was still possible to read back the data on the Piql film.”

The archive’s location is also part of its protection strategy. Loen says AWA worked with the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment to determine that the safest long-term storage site for Piql film was inside a mountain vault in the Arctic. The extreme cold acts as a kind of natural freezer, slowing decay. The remoteness discourages tampering. The political neutrality of Svalbard — a territory under Norwegian sovereignty but governed by international treaty — offers a rare kind of global safeguard.

AWA launched a foundation in May of this year, and Loen says she and her team are now focused on broadening access, inviting contributions from communities, cultures and institutions that might otherwise be left out of the historical record. “We would like to make it more international,” Loen says, “[with contributions] from all around the world.”

Memory for Mankind

Faced with the limits of today’s hardware, researchers are exploring solutions that sound more like science fiction than data management. Some are experimenting with storing information in strands of synthetic DNA, encoding data at a molecular level. The advantage is staggering density. In a 2017 study, researchers from Columbia University and the New York Genome Center demonstrated that a single gram of DNA could theoretically store up to 215 petabytes of data. At that scale, all the world’s internet-accessible data could fit in a shoebox. But DNA storage remains experimental and prohibitively expensive, with many technical hurdles still to clear.

Then there’s the return to the oldest, simplest medium of all: ceramic. More than 5,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, officials developed one of the world’s first writing systems, known as cuneiform. Pressed into clay tablets and baked for permanence, these early records captured the bureaucratic rhythms of a growing civilization: inventories, trade accounts and administrative logs. Many of the unearthed tablets are considered humanity’s oldest known written records. That durability inspired Martin Kunze, an Austrian ceramist, to imagine what a modern equivalent of the ancient plaques might look like.

Kunze’s answer is the Memory of Mankind (MoM) project, an archive housed inside the dark caverns of one of the world’s oldest salt mines in the Austrian Alps. The environment is stable, watertight and protected from natural disasters — ideal conditions for preserving physical material for millennia. Founded in 2012, the project is designed as a cultural time capsule that reflects the diversity of life and knowledge of today.

Unlike conventional archives, MoM invites contributions from a wide swath of society — from university researchers and museums to local clubs, civic groups and individuals. Entries range from doctoral theses and images of famous artworks to popular novels, news stories and family photos, creating a multifaceted portrait of our era.

Inside the mine, square ceramic plates measuring eight inches across are printed with text and pictures using a high-energy laser. Each tablet holds the equivalent of roughly 20 pages of content. A special “Rosetta Stone”-style guide is embedded in the archive, explaining the language and symbols used to ensure that those future archaeologists who do find the tablets someday can decipher what’s on them.

To encourage global participation, MoM uses a sliding-scale model to price its ceramic plates. “In Norway, it’s 600 euros for a package. In Brazil, it’s 60. In Austria, it’s 350,” Kunze says. The hope is to ensure that the archive doesn’t just reflect powerful nations and dominant cultures, but humanity in all its nuance.

Rethinking Industrial Storage

Kunze now sees MoM as just the beginning. His new venture, Cerabyte, co-founded with entrepreneur Christian Pflaum, is a company that aims to bring ceramic storage into the industrial mainstream. Using specially developed ceramic cards capable of being etched by femtosecond lasers, Cerabyte’s technology — like disk drives — offers fast, random access, so data can be retrieved instantly without scanning through everything in sequence. At the same time, it provides the energy-free immutability of magnetic tape. Once data is written, it can’t be altered or erased, making it tamper-resistant. “It combines the best of both disk and tape,” concludes Moore, who recently wrote a white paper on the new technology.

At CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, petabytes of experimental data currently sit on magnetic tape. The Swiss research institute, which frequently needs to reference older experiments, is exploring more durable, low-maintenance options. According to Kunze, CERN is set to be one of Cerabyte’s pilot clients. “The workload in their data center is already completely unproductive. It's just data maintenance and migration,” he says. “This will just increase as the data amount grows.”

At a recent tech conference, the company showcased the resilience of its medium by submerging one of its ceramic plates in a boiler of salt water for 24 hours. The verdict? The data remained readable.

Yet even with technical advances, a larger question looms: Who controls the infrastructure of memory? “The storage industry is in a precarious position,” Moore says. “There’s only one tape drive manufacturer in the world, IBM. Only three companies make disk drives: Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba. That’s 85% of the world’s data right there in the hands of just a couple of companies.”

In that context, while interest in alternative materials and media may be growing, the deeper vulnerabilities of long-term storage may lie in the structure of the industry itself.

Between Now and Forever

On October 2, 2023, one of the autonomous vehicles in General Motors' Cruise robotaxi program was involved in a high-profile accident in San Francisco. A pedestrian was dragged by a driverless car for roughly 20 feet. Regulators later revoked Cruise’s license after concluding that the company lacked sufficient recorded data to fully reconstruct the incident. GM ultimately shuttered its entire robotaxi efforts as a result. 

The case illustrates a broader imperative in the age of ubiquitous AI and automation. “There is a high risk for companies using AI for decision processes where people are involved,” says Kunze. “It amounts to unprecedented piles of data, which, just for liability reasons, need to be stored.” As companies — especially those deploying autonomous systems — brace for legal, ethical and operational scrutiny, the burden on storage solutions grows exponentially.

And yet, the tools the modern world relies on to store that data may be ill-suited for longevity at scale. For companies like GM, which require fast, high-volume access to recent data, the challenge lies in balancing immediacy with reliability. Newer technologies are attempting to bridge that gap, combining speed with more durable, energy-efficient formats.

Meanwhile, archival efforts in Arctic vaults and Alpine salt mines point to a different mission: safeguarding a sliver of civilization’s knowledge for a distant future. In the Yottabyte Era, storage will no longer be just about capacity. It will be about what we choose to remember — and how long we expect it to last.