Essay

The Norwegian territory of Svalbard, far above the Arctic Circle, contains two notable repositories. Both make use of permafrost to store natural and cultural information from around the world. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) opened up in 2008 and preserves duplicates of seeds from gene banks around the world. It sees itself as safeguarding against natural as well as human-caused disasters and securing global crop biodiversity. Inspired by the success of the SGSV, the Arctic World Archive (AWA) opened up next door in 2017. A for-profit operation owned by private digital preservation company Piql and the state-owned coal-mining company Store Norse Spitsbergen Kulkompani, the AWA contains encoded information stored on film reels like the one depicted above, and sees itself as securing world memory and global cultural heritage. Both repositories are just outside of Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost permanently inhabited town with a population greater than one thousand. While the above image of microscopic code and a map on film might not seem to have much to do with Arctic environments, it represents complex relationships between visuality, digitality, memory, materiality, and ice in the Arctic.

Produced by the company Piql, reels of piqlFilm in the AWA store important cultural, artistic, political, and scientific information from around the world. Data are turned into binary QR code and then printed, at an extremely high resolution, on silver halide film for long-term storage. Piql sees itself as offering a secure storage medium for companies, institutions, and organizations’ data. In contrast to the “hot media” of the internet, “cold media” in the AWA cannot be hacked or deleted. In the AWA, Piql trades the “cloud” for Arctic ice to offer an offline data center. Here, the materiality of film combines with the materiality of frozen earth to store world memory in a way not possible in other places. Because of this, Piql sees the AWA as “secure, environmentally friendly, and future proof,” and claims that the film should last for 500 to 1000 years. But even if it does, how would future generations be able to access and read the contents? The first frames on each film reel contain decoding instructions in five different languages. These instructions tell future readers how to turn the microscopic code into usable files, but assume the future reader would have access to a computer and a camera.

In addition to a digital format taking the form of nanometer-scale QR code, piqlFilm supports a visual format for the occasional human-readable document, important painting, or historic photograph. In the above image, the visual format is represented with the world map. The greyish bands above and below it are actually composed of numerous nanoscale QR codes, representing the digital format of data. Deposits into the AWA include national constitutions, open-source code from GitHub, historical maps, and famous paintings such as Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893). Also among the information stored in this way are images from the European Space Agency (ESA), which has made several deposits of satellite imagery into the AWA. The deposit of satellite imagery is interesting given the intimate relationship between polar ice and orbital satellites. Satellite imagery has been valuable for the monitoring of sea ice and measuring of glacial retreat in the Arctic. Now, ESA images make use of this very ice for its propensity for long-term preservation.

The geology of Svalbard plays a key role in the placement of the archives here. The AWA is located in a decommissioned coal mine, and the supplemental refrigeration of the SGSV is powered by locally-mined coal. The mine’s uphill orientation, combined with Svalbard’s low seismicity, adds to the AWA’s purported longevity and safety from floods and collapse. The cold temperatures are the reason Piql touts AWA as “the only data storage facility in the world with a zero-carbon footprint.” But ironically, coal, whose mining hollowed out a space for the archive, is responsible for carbon emissions from fossil fuels. The irony of this is mirrored on a larger scale in Norway, a country with a complicated relationship with nonrenewable energy. On one hand, Norway is a green energy leader. Yet it is also significant producer of oil and, as Svalbard exemplifies, coal. While the need for data security in the AWA is not imagined just in relation to pressures from climate change, it’s impossible to not see how its appeal is magnified by global warming. Coal’s absence creates the physical space for the archive, while its atmospheric presence implicitly informs the context of its creation. Furthermore, while repositories make use of frozen Earth to preserve information about the world, ice around the world is under threat from climate change.

Ice is one of the best natural preservation mediums. Cores drilled from ice sheets and stored in places like the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver archive past atmospheres. Glaciers around the world preserve biological specimens. But it’s not just natural memory that is preserved; cultural memory is also stored in ice (Frank and Jakobsen 2019). Archives make use of cold storage for the preservation of important or fragile documents, and refrigeration has changed eating practices and cultural foodways (Rees 2016; Hobart 2022; Twilley 2024). In Dawson City in the Yukon Territory in 1978, an abandoned cache of 372 silent movies that had been lost to history was discovered on silver nitrate film. While other silent-era silver nitrate films had been lost due to fire (silver nitrate, unlike silver halide film, is highly combustible), the Yukon permafrost preserved them. The documentary film Dawson City, Frozen Time (2016) reanimates cosmopolitan scenes of the wider world, once enjoyed by people in the heyday of the Yukon Gold Rush (Morrison 2016). So while the SGSV and AWA are hardly the only examples of this intimate relationship between ice, memory, and culture, they do have a different relationship to time: not so much freezing the past as imagining the future.

The geological and thermal setting of the archive alone isn’t enough for successful preservation. In addition to these natural conditions, political climates are essential preservation tools for archives and for anything imagined on such long time scales. Svalbard and Norway are seen as providing a stable and politically neutral geopolitical context for the safe storage of seed biodiversity and world memory. Narratives of Norway’s high level of development play in here, as well as the unique conditions created by the Svalbard Treaty. Ratified in 1920 and originally signed by 14 countries (now 46), the Svalbard Treaty establishes Norwegian sovereignty over the archipelago. But it also recognizes the territory as a visa free zone where signatories are given equal rights to engage in commercial activities (like coal mining). It also restricts military uses, although Svalbard is not demilitarized. In addition to the image of Norway as stable guardian, the legal globality of Svalbard plays into the AWA’s self-perception as a welcoming host for “world memory.” Its vaults are open equally to all—as long as they pay!

Yet the permafrost conditions and geopolitical security of Svalbard doesn’t mean these repositories are universally applauded or free from controversy. There is a tension here between global access and remote location, between worldly contents and local context, and between long term legibility and inevitable media obsolescence. Places like the SGSV and AWA imagine the Arctic, and places like Svalbard, less as unique localities and more as a place of deep time and global significance. Furthermore, the “doomsday vault” and “apocalyptic vault” monikers participate in contentious imaginaries. These narratives are often seen as unseating the potential for Indigenous sovereignty and futurity in the Arctic. While Svalbard had no Indigenous presence prior to its settlement by various European powers, Indigenous communities in many other areas of the Arctic have to continuously assert their sovereignty, history, and futurity against ongoing colonialism. As many have discussed, ‘doom’ and ‘decline’ aren’t always neutral or useful ways of narrating the Arctic and ice (Dodds and Smith 2022; Dodds and Sörlin 2022). The climate anxieties that might fuel temperate places’ interests in the AWA are often felt first in the Arctic. The politics of time and memory that the SGSV and AWA embody play out in contentious ways across the Arctic and within academic debates about changing ice and its impacts.

The implication of the AWA’s vision—that microscopic code and digitized data could prevent a future (presumably post-catastrophic) people from having to start fully anew—assumes a very particular view of what cultural heritage looks like. This view of rupture and retrieval contrasts with a view of culture as continuity—of embodied practice and social traditions. It buffers narratives that cold, digital “memory” is an adequate, and investment-worthy, method of “representing human culture” and showing the “inner workings” of our world (Dais 2021). The AWA sees “every item within its vaults is a reminder that our past, present, and future are all intertwined, and AWA is the guardian of this precious connection” (Arctic World Archive 2024). This technocratic, for-profit stewardship of so-called “world memory” should be called into question. It’s worth asking who gets to be included, what visions of our present and future are put forth, and how else we might imagine world memory and care across time.