Famous Painting Will Be Safe for More Than a Thousand Years… in an Arctic Coal Mine

Norway’s National Museum has decided to place a digital version of Edvard Munch’s masterpiece The Scream in an Arctic coal mine designed to last more than a millennium.

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

In 2017, the technology company Piql created the Arctic World Archive as “a safe repository for world memory”. Located on the island of Spitsbergen, east of Greenland, the safe holds copies of more than 400,000 objects from more than 15 countries. Each digital version starts with a photograph. The images are then transferred to a specialized analog film. Regardless of technology changes, “the only thing you need to read the film is light,” says Rolf Yngve Uggen, the museum’s director of collections management.