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SVALBARD

Huge Arctic island estate on sale in Norway

Fancy owning your own Arctic paradise more than twice the size of Manhattan, complete with coal mine, minor mountain chain and occasional polar bear?

Published: 29 April 2014 13:46 CEST
Huge Arctic island estate on sale in Norway
The Operafjellet mountain on the Austre Adventfjord estate. Photo: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen/Wikimedia Commons
A secretive family from Bergen, Norway, has quietly put a vast 217 square kilometre swathe of Norway's Svalbard Islands up for sale. 
 
The property, Austre Adventfjord, located directly across the bay from Longyearbyen, the islands' capital, has been put up for sale by Henning Horn, a Norwegian industrialist and farmer, and his sisters Elin and Kari Horn.
 
The three sellers are the grandchildren of shipowner Jacob Kjøde, from Bergen, who bought the land in 1937 to establish a coal mining company. 
 
"The property is now for sale and I have no comments on the actual sales process," the Horns' lawyer Sveinung Flatten confirmed to  VG newspaper. 
 
The property includes the abandoned mining community of Hiorthhamn and the Operafjellet mountain, where a Russian plane crashed in 1996, killing 141 people.  
 
According to VG, the family put the property up for sale after falling out with Store Norske, the Norwegian mining giant which formerly operated the coal mines on the property.
 
The area is estimated to contain some 25 million tons of coal, which could sustain mining for more than 15 years.
 
Svalbard expert Willy Østreng told VG that China could be interested in buying the property to gain a foothold in the Arctic and exploit it for its coal reserves. 
 
"China is in constant search of coal and other natural resources, and more importantly, by purchasing this property, the can use Svalbard as a platform for a long-term play on the Arctic Ocean Basin," he told the newspaper. 
 
He pointed out that China has already established a research base in Ny- Ålesund on the island of Spitsbergen. 

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MUSEUM

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.

READ ALSO: Norway's Arctic 'doomsday vault' stocks up on 60,000 more food seeds

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