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The Global Seed Vault in Svalbard. (Frode Ramone/Wikimedia/CC BY 2.0)


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15 NOVEMBER 2019

Next to the famous Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway, is an abandoned coal mine protecting a different kind of resource against the end of the world: all of GitHub's open source code.



Since 2017, the Arctic World Archive, as it's called, has stored other digital records, including the Vatican archives, movies, and anything else deemed worth saving, according to a new Bloomberg feature.

And now, with Microsoft-owned GitHub's contribution, it also holds a hard copy of nearly all the open source software in the world, which can be read with nothing more than a magnifying lens.


Think Facebook, Google, and Amazon - all of them rely on it.

So, while GitHub's data dump seems like - and probably partially is - a bit of a stunt, it could someday prove useful if a catastrophe wipes out the world's hard drives.
