She’s quoting tests done by Norwegian research firm Norner, whose accelerated testing of piqlFilm found a longevity of 750 years at 21˚C and humidity of 50%, which means a reel of film stored today would be reaching its theoretical expiry date in autumn 2770. “Our film will last 750 years at least,” claims Alfheim.
Once the door of the mine slams shut, the question becomes one of longevity. Once a film is written, it’s packed safely into canisters and transported to Longyearbyen, where it’s stored in Mine Number 3, an abandoned coal mine repurposed for ultra-long-term data archival. Each reel of film is 950m long and holds 120GB of data. That means using an ultra-clear emulsion, as noise accidentally recorded on the film could damage the data it holds. “To have that much data stored, has to have a very, very clear base,” says Alfheim. “It’s called nanodensity.”ĭon’t scoff: That single 35mm frame of film packs in 8.8 million data points, translating to 2MB of data per frame.
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“This frame is a very high density QR code which holds a fair amount of information,” says Patricia Alfheim, Piql’s communication manager. Thomsen’s piqlFilm business card has all the usual information you’d expect, but it’s the light-grey frame at the bottom that’s the company’s prize. Her business card is made of the same stuff that could one day offer insights into our ancient civilisation: piqlFilm is the same size as the 35mm film used in motion picture cameras and comes in reels almost a kilometre long. Thomsen is the deputy managing director of Norwegian company Piql (you get the joke), whose technology is behind the Arctic World Archive. On a Zoom call to Oslo, Katrine Loen Thomsen holds her business card up to her webcam.
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As humanity 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 place to figure out how to start again. Inside an abandoned mine with an underground vault, a unique, long-term backup effort that so far includes artefacts as diverse as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, sample data acquired by the European Space Agency’s first Earth remote sensing satellite, a digitised copy of Edvard Munch’s The Scream and more than 20TB of data from open source repository GitHub. 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. Seven key considerations for microservices-based application deliveryĮnsuring the success of your cloud-native journey Download now