A ‘Doomsday Library’ to protect the world’s most precious books from Armageddon has opened in Svalbard in Norway.
Nestled deep in the Arctic permafrost, the storage facility holds vast quantities of data on long-lasting film, rather than hard drives.
The vault is designed to be able to survive a nuclear war and was located in Svalbard because the area is effectively a demilitarised zone.
It’s the region’s second so-called Doomsday Vault, the first of which stores seeds that could be extracted if a disaster wiped out Earth’s crops.
The film, developed by a firm called Piql, is stored deep in a mine frozen in the permafrost, ensuring it maintains a constant temperature.
“We believe that we can save the data using our technology for a whole 1,000 years,” Piql’s Katrine Loen Thomsen told the Norwegian broadcaster NRK.
So far, only Mexico and Brazil have signed up to have their national archives stored in the vault, the Sun reported.
But the World Arctic Archive hopes that more countries will soon see the benefits of storing their books using the sophisticated storage system.
Eric Cardoso from Mexico’s National Archives told NRK: “There is a special feeling that I should save my nation’s memory on the Arctic island.”