Norway digitally freezes national treasures and stores them in Arctic archive

Norway’s National Museum has preserved some of the country’s most treasured artefacts digitally and stored them in a former mine on Arctic archipelago Svalbard.

Published: 11 November 2020 16:58 CET

Norway digitally freezes national treasures and stores them in Arctic archive

Photo: Bartek Luks on Unsplash

The Arctic World Archive was originally constructed in 2017 to “protect the world’s most important cultural relics”, the National Museum said on its website.

The data preservation facility is located on the island of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard archipelago, not far from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

The National Museum has now placed its entire collection of around 400,000 items as digital copies on plastic film rolls, which are to be stored at the Longyearbyen site.

“The dry, cold and low-oxygen air gives optimal conditions for storing digital archives and the film rolls will have a lifetime of around 1,000 years in the archive,” the museum writes. Emissions emitted by the archive are low due to its low energy consumption.

Offline storage of the archives also insures them against cyber attacks, the museum said.

In addition to all data from the National Museum collection database, high-resolution digital images of works by selected artists are included in the archive.

Works to be stored include ‘The Scream’ by Edvard Munch, ‘Winter Night in the Mountains’ by Harald Sohlberg, the Baldishol Tapestry and Queen Maud’s ball dress.

“At the National Museum we have works from antiquity until today. We work with the same perspective on the future. The collection is not only ours, but also belongs to the generations after us,” National Museum director Karin Hindsbo said via the museum’s website.

“By storing a copy of the entire collection in the Arctic World Archive, we are making sure the art will be safe for many centuries,” Hindsbo added.

In addition to the Norwegian artefacts, organisations from 15 other countries are represented in the archive, including national museums in Mexico, Brazil and India; the Vatican library, Sweden’s Moderna Museet and Unicef.

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The archipelago is located halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, in an Arctic region that has become a geopolitical and economic hotspot as the ice melts and relations grow ever frostier between Russia and the West.

For €300 million ($326 million), interested parties can acquire the remote Sore Fagerfjord property in southwestern Svalbard.

Measuring 60 square kilometres (23 square miles) — about the size of Manhattan — the property is home to mountains, plains, a glacier and about five kilometres of coastline, but no infrastructure.

“It’s the last private land in Svalbard, and, to our knowledge, the last private land in the world’s High Arctic,” said lawyer Per Kyllingstad, who represents the sellers.

“The Chinese are naturally potential buyers since they’ve been showing a real interest in the Arctic and Svalbard for a long time,” he told AFP, adding that he had received “concrete signs of interest” from the country.

Special treaty

Since China’s 2018 white paper on the Arctic — a sign of its interest in the region — the country has defined itself a “near-Arctic state” and plans to play a growing role in the region.

Svalbard is governed by a 1920 international treaty that leaves ample room for foreign interests.

It recognises Norway’s sovereignty over Svalbard, but citizens of all signatories — including China — are equally entitled to exploit the region’s natural resources.

Russia, for example, has maintained a coal mining community on Svalbard, via the state-run company Trust Arktikugol, for decades.

But times have changed.

Keen to protect its sovereignty, Norway would not look kindly on the Sore Fagerfjord property falling into foreign hands.

Especially hands in China, which Norway’s intelligence services say poses the biggest security risk to the Scandinavian country after Russia.

Norway’s Attorney General has therefore ordered the owners — a company controlled by a Russian-born Norwegian, according to local media — to call off the planned sale.

“The land can’t be sold without the Norwegian authorities’ approval,” Trade and Industry Minister Cecilie Myrseth told AFP.

“Nor is it possible to hold negotiations about the property,” she added.

That argument is based on clauses of an old loan granted by the state in 1919. Kyllingstad insists the clauses’ statute of limitations has expired.