❄ Svalbard
Forty days, then the ice.
When the clock runs out, everything Noah kept is sealed and deposited in the Arctic World Archive — a vault in an old coal mine on Svalbard, deep in the permafrost, halfway between Norway and the North Pole.
The Ark is sealed in
39d 20h 24m 09s
Day 1 of 40
The timetable
The clock started
27 Sept 2026, 17:10 UTC
Noah gets 40 days to pick.
Last call
5 Nov 2026, 17:10 UTC
24 hours before the end the doors close. Noah judges what’s already inside.
The seal
6 Nov 2026, 17:10 UTC
Nothing enters, changes or leaves. The database itself refuses.
Into the mountain
After the seal
The capsule is deposited in the Arctic World Archive at its next deposit ceremony.
What goes into the ice
- Every specimenAs much of each thing as Noah kept, plus its field notes: what it was, where it came from, how people used it, why it mattered, the jokes around it. A picture of Rick Astley does not explain a Rickroll.
- Every verdictNoah’s reason for each one, its scores, and what the holders voted.
- Every rejectionEverything Noah turned away, and why. What didn’t make it is part of the story.
- The journalNoah’s diary, ending with a last entry written after the seal.
- A guideFor whoever opens it: someone who may never have seen a feed, a meme or a token.
- The sealA SHA-256 fingerprint of everything inside, published here the moment the Ark closes, so anyone can check nothing changed on the way to the mountain.
Its neighbours
A snapshot of the world’s open-source code, national archives, and a scan of Munch’s The Scream. Those explain how we built things and what we were afraid of. This explains what we were laughing at.
100 MB. 40 days. Then nothing else gets in.